A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire
by Synthesis
Summary: Before the Space Forces sent Alan Chandrasekhar to study the Ctarl-Ctarl, he lived alongside them, fled from them, and fought against them in the two last Terran-Ctarl-Ctarl Wars. The story of an inept military man and the three decades he spent learning about the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. A companion piece to 'Observations of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire'.
1. 28 Terran Standard Years Ago

**_A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire_**

_28 Terran Standard Years Ago_

It was _XXXX_, Towards Star Calendar, probably around February—he had no way of being certain—and Alan Chandrasekhar had made peace with his Terran Gods. He did not consider himself a religious man, but in light of the circumstances—what he considered his very likely death in the coming week—he decided to risk the hypocrisy if only so it gave him something to do as he watched his demise come around the corner. He prayed to Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu as described to him by his grandmother two decades earlier, when he was a toddler. He tried to seek harmony with the Tao, to embrace the natural non-action that he faced in his captivity. He contemplated the nature of Adi Parashakti, the supposed creator and mother of all that existed, and until he was comfortably certain he did not understand anything anymore than he had in his secular, cynical freedom prior to captivity.

Eleven months ago, then-Lieutenant Chandrasekhar had been aboard the USFS _Free Virtue_, a cruiser that was crippled during the Battle of Victoria, towards what he assumed was the end of the Terran-Ctarl War. It was an invasive strike from the 9th Expeditionary Fleet that was supposed to sever the supply lines to a Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial space fleet that was said to be overextended in its approach to Sentinel III, an otherwise valueless border world in the Ban Guild. Except, as usual, something went wrong. Most of the task force was annihilated, not by the Imperial Navy squadrons stationed to defend Victoria II, but by undiscovered planetary orbital guns. In effect, an intelligence failure had caused the loss of the _Free Virtue_, which was separated from the rest of the task force and crashed into Victoria II.

Other than being the victim of a ridiculous intelligence failure from Headquarters, Chandrasekhar was lucky. The _Free Virtue _had split up upon reentry and the command section—which housed the bridge and communications equipment—had landed about 15 kilometers from the bulk of the ship. Chandrasekhar was the only survivor of the already decimated bridge crew after the crash. As procedure dictated, he made his way, on foot, to where the rest of the ship was, only to be captured by Imperial Navy sailors. Technically, it was sailor _singular_, as in, one muscular, dark skinned Ctarl-Ctarl woman who was shorter than him, but made up for it with long hair, a large chest and the ability to literally pick him up and throw him across the snowy plains of the polar region where he'd landed, with minimal effort.

"You will fight no more." That's what she told him, in her native tongue, after she'd thrown him into a snow drift about 20 meters away. She then marched him about 30 kilometers, rather briskly, to her own camp. That was his first exhausting day as a Ctarl-Ctarl prisoner-of-war.

He was surprised to be captured alive, until he found out what happened to the rest of the _Free Virtue: _the survivors had held up the wreck, fighting off the arriving Imperial patrol with whatever weapons they had on hand, surprisingly well, until the Ctarl-Ctarl unceremoniously, and maybe unintentionally, set off one of the ship's Munchausen Reactors, consuming the whole spot in a massive, probably radioactive fireball. The Ctarl-Ctarl were mildly discomforted; the Terrans were literally cooked to cinders. There were no other suvivors from the _Free Virtue_, and after the battle ended, Chandrasekhar was of some value.

He remembered the end of his first day in captivity, after that grueling march, vividly, despite having been almost a year ago.

"Chandrasekhar, Alan Shekhar. Lieutenant. United Space Forces Navy, Ninth Expeditionary Fleet. Executive Officer aboard the _Free __Virtue_. Service code AA-Zero-Nine-Zero…"

"Okay, shut up, Alan," the Ctarl-Ctarl in charge, a midshipwoman in one of those rather ridiculous looking dark red formfitting bodysuit with off-white plastoid shoulder guards, collar ring and chest fittings, told him humorlessly. They all wore them; he understood that when a Ctarl-Ctarl could literally tear you to pieces if they were in a bad mood, it didn't matter how ridiculous their uniforms looked. They searched his possessions, rather than interrogating him, which he found a little odd. Indeed, the camp that served as his prison only had about had about two-dozen Ctarl-Ctarl present, and there presence was not immediately clear to him.

The next eleven months were disappointing, to say the least. After basically throwing him around when it was necessary to transport him, the Ctarl-Ctarl set up his "cell", which was an open spot on the edge of their camp: that is, their supply depot, barracks, armory and showers, all made of prefabricated buildings that had been assembled prior to his arrival. Upon the first day of this arrangement, he did the natural thing: he waited until the snowfall reached its thickest, hoarded whatever cloaks—the Ctarl-Ctarl wore ridiculous skintight clothes, but liked cloaks and scarves—and supplies he could obtain, and made his escape.

That was his first mistake. Marching through the snow, wearing the same clothes he'd been captured in, he was about to flee probably about eighteen kilometers to where he thought was a nearby settlement. He'd gambled, stupidly, that he could find a city with a spaceport and arrange some passage off world. He found neither, of course. His second mistake was thinking he could have reached a city even if there was one in the area: the next morning, when the snow relented, one of the Ctarl-Ctarl sailors, quite casually, went out on a morning run before breakfast, found him cold and exhausted in a snow bank, and literally dragged him back to camp, where he was thrown about a bit more and left to sit in his spot, after they took the cloaks and supplies he'd stolen. He didn't even know how they'd tracked him, certainly not by his footprints, which the fallen snow had erased. They might have smelled or even heard him. Eternally a pessimist, he did not try again.

'Alan' figured out what was expected of him: using tools supplied to him by his captors, he manage to build a very small but otherwise acceptable cabin from nearby fern trees that the Ctarl-Ctarl would literally yank out in order to cut into firewood. Once he had shelter, he was able to make some crude furniture out of refuse thrown out by the Ctarl-Ctarl: a ration drum—some of the Ctarl-Ctarl rations literally came in _drums_—served as a table while he was able to fix a folding chair into something that mostly worked. With that, he could take his meals inside, rather than sitting in the snow waiting for some sailor to realize it was time to the feed the captive and try and bean him in the head with a soup can. Soup was pretty much the one thing the sailors regularly had that he could easily eat, he was not in a position to eat the weird indigenous life they hunted or fished, cleaned, gutted and cook.

He did this for eleven months. Without any word or sign from the Space Forces, for whom he expected the war was going poorly, if the good spirits of his captors were any indication. The sailors, whom all looked younger than him, some of them having barely finished adolescence, were perpetually energetic, cheerful, and self-amused. The polar climate did not affect them in the least, nor did the very long days followed by very long and even more depressing nights.

Eventually, they started taking pity on him. While they refused to give any indication as to when he'd be freed—he assumed when the war was over and prisoners were finally exchanged—they decided to be sociable. It was perhaps ironic, just as Terrans looked at Ctarl-Ctarl as animals, so did his captors approach him as such. Their first step was to give him better food, and more of it, but require that leave his cabin to do so. They got the idea to teach him their language—naturally, like all officers he knew the basics, but he could hardly converse intelligently.

In the middle of that, one of them pointed out the obvious:

"You know, he looks like an animal. And smells worse."

Despite his 'resistance', a sailor literally picked him up, and dragged him to the shower—a prefabricated-building attached to a chemical washroom. To his surprise, there were actually two Ctarl-Ctarl women showering there already. Upon seeing them, his reaction was to immediately scramble for the door, only to have the same sailor grab him, strip him down, and throw him into a stall. They only released him after he had his first real bath in weeks, scrubbing himself down with a bar of soap. After that, one of those two women, still soapy, dragged him out, dropped him in front of a mirror, and with the expression of child playing with a doll, shaved him and cut his hair with a razor. The whole experience was horrifying—a nude Ctarl-Ctarl pressed against his back, shaving his beard with a razor as sharp as surgical scalpel and the size of a large combat knife, humming and whistling as she periodically checked her progress in the mirror. The Ctarl-Ctarl did not have a Terran appreciation of physical modesty, nor a Terran fear of sharp blades.

They washed his uniform blues and returned them to him and, all things considered, he actually felt as good as he had since his captivity began, or did once he finished shaking from nearly having his neck slit. Now that he was suitable-looking and his odor was inoffensive, the socialization began in earnest.

This was as much 'resistance' as he ever mounted. He was a graduate of the top naval school of the Tenpa Empire, a candidate for a _doctorate_. The Ctarl-Ctarl were not as stupid as domesticated cats, far from it, and they were much more intelligent than any stereotype would suggest, but of the two-dozen sailors mysteriously marooned on the planet, none of them had been educated past the Ctarl-Ctarl equivalent of tertiary school, and none a university education. There was not a single commissioned officer among them, to his surprise. As a result, it was easy to resist their simple intellectual ploys and jibes as his frailty. He deliberately kept them at a distance, refusing to become _too _friendly, even though the Ctarl-Ctarl were a friendly bunch to say the least. In time, he learned why they, and by extension himself, were still on Victoria II: their frigate had been crippled by in that faithful battle, and they had been deployed on the planet to ensure that any Terran survivors were collected. Despite having orbital guns, Victoria II was sparsely populated, except for a completely different continent than the one where he resided, and there was no spaceport without ten thousand kilometers. And so, here they all were, trying the make the best of a particularly boring assignment.

Chandrasekhar did not take it as well as they did.

It was the next year, around the month of February, where his daily routine of cool, cold disinterest was interrupted. He had a faithful conversation with the midshipwoman, the same NCO in charge, albeit now wearing her bodysuit unzipped to her waist, her brown hair grown out into a giant, long braid, and her prominent chest wrapped in surplus cloth like a _sarashi. _She informed him of something they'd kept from him for several months: another scuttled Space Forces ship, the carrier _Augustus_, was actually on an impact course just a few kilometers away, and when it hit, it would probably explode with a force of as much as a hundred megatons, courtesy of its reactors and ordnance. So they were going to evacuate, and had to decide what to do with him.

He didn't know what upset him more: that this had been kept from him, or that they hadn't even considered returning him _after the war had ended. _Which it had!

Chandrasekhar faced a dilemma: he did not want to die after all this, but the notion of remaining in Ctarl-Ctarl custody for an indefinite period managed to be even worse. He was a Space Forces officer! It was better to die in honor than to live out his life as either a prisoner or a novelty on an enemy world. With all the solemnness he could manage, he calmly informed that he would not accompany her crew, no matter what, so they might as well let him flee on his own, against orders, or shoot him right now.

The midshipwoman was not impressed and expressed this by throwing the table at him. When his resolve became apparent, they did not use their usual method of simply picking him up and forcing him, but instead, left their camp once a shuttle arrived for them. And so it was his last day of captivity: the Ctarl-Ctarl sailors boarded, one of the sailors looking genuinely remorseful as he glowered at them from his cabin. She gave him a sad wave before stepping through the doors, as the shuttle departed.

Chandrasekhar wasn't purely suicidal—he felt he had rationally considered his options. Unfortunately, he did not know _where _the _Augustus _would descend, though it didn't matter: whether it exploded just above the surface or impacted, the area of hundreds, if not thousands, of square kilometers would be devastated. There was no point in fleeing—his one chance was to join the Ctarl-Ctarl, and having rejected that, it was time to meet his maker. He moved into the prefabricated buildings left behind and helped himself to what was left of the canned soup and tea. He tried smoking a Ctarl-Ctarl cigarette, which turned out to be a bad idea to put it mildly, contemplated life and death, and waited to be consumed in a massive fireball.

His redemption came in an unexpected form: what looked like a meteorite impact that, upon inspection, was actually a small block from the carrier. Inside, in what was a fantastically lucky break, was a one-man recon ship. It took all of Chandrasekhar's resourcefulness and knowledge to get it in working order, and as the _Augustus _went from a twinkle to a bright streak in the night sky, he triumphantly departed, leaving a message written on the inside of the crashed block, which might survive the incoming blast if his crudely repaired ship did not.

_Lieutenant Alan Shekhar Chandrasekhar, of the USFS_ Free Virtue_ of the 9__th__ Expeditionary Fleet, United Space Forces, was here on Victoria II for 339 days. Escaped to space on a craft salvaged from the descending USFS _Augustus. _Preserve my memory for my beloved family, the Chandresekhars of Ji Ward, Eastern Capital, Tenpa Imperial Capital World. _

He survived, narrowly, thanks to a Corbanite commercial salvage ship that picked him up once he was in orbit, and out of fuel, around Victoria II. It took three weeks, but he was eventually returned to what was left of the 9th Expeditionary Fleet, along the edges of Kei Guild Space. But even with the Treaty of Heifong and the end of the war, it was not his last encounter with the Ctarl-Ctarl, but the first of many of the next thirty years.


	2. 27 Terran Standard Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_27 T.S. Years Ago_

The year after his captivity went very well for Captain Alan Chandrasekhar, considering it might not have otherwise. Most obviously, after the court martial—contrary to popular thought, the Space Forces always conducted courts-martial following the loss of a ship, without the presumption of guilt of any survivors—he had been found to have gone above and beyond the call of duty to the United Space Forces. Everything entered into the official record reflected positively on him, and he was granted a rather enviable post: the U.S.F. Naval Base at Heifong Prime, headquarters of the 9th Expeditionary Fleet.

After spending a year with the Ctarl-Ctarl, and with the war over, he was fully prepared to spend his thirties as a desk jockey, and enjoy the comforts of climate control and regular visits to his family in the Tenpa Empire. Maybe he'd finally settle down and get a serious girlfriend—though the thing about Heifong was that it was a bastion of civilization in otherwise infamous space controlled by the Acid-B Guild, the chaotic wild west of Terran Space. Once you left the USSA and military worlds like Oracion, Acid-B Space was not sort of place you wanted to spend any prolonged period of time, much less fraternize with the locals, at the risk of ending up with some sort of insane telepathic cowgirl with psychokinesis and fetish for leather and spurs. Better to remain Ban Space, learn Vietnamese in addition to the Mandarin Chinese that everyone already spoke in U.S.F., and where the worse a local would do was invite you to their shimmering penthouse and leave you in a hot tub, drunk on cocktails, while she emptied out your wallet. Space Forces officers, especially men, tended not to cross the Ban-Acid-B border.

Alan wasn't stupid, so it was a good posting. He served as secretary to the adjutant of the Fleet Admiral, a career-minded commander. The closest he'd gotten to the front during what was now called the Great Terran-Ctarl-Ctarl War was the bridge of a carrier flagship at Heifong—he was as close to the Ctarl-Ctarl border now as he'd ever been. Still, he was very intelligent, and not the kind of man to be trifled with. A few months after his transfer, he made that apparent.

"Alan Shekhar," he began, in that dangerously friendly manner. "It occurs to me that _we_ have no business keeping a genuine war hero pent up here at headquarters signing TPS reports in triplicate."

"I'm actually quite happy with my posting, sir."

"Oh, come now, you needn't lie for my benefit," the commander told him, obviously aware that he wasn't lying. "The forward base at Heifong V needs a captain to show the rookies the ropes and I think you'd be perfect. So what about it? A bonus for the transfer, an actual command, shuttle to Heifong whenever you want it, maybe some action for a change?"

It actually _did _sound like a good posting. It wasn't until sometime later he'd realized why he'd been transferred—the commander was moving to become the power behind the power at 9th Fleet Headquarters, and the Admiralty was actively seeking out decorated veterans from the war, including the disastrous Victoria Campaign—for what purpose wasn't clear. By sending him to Heifong V, the commander got to put his own man (actually a woman) in instead. Alan knew none of this and went to Heifong V perfectly content.

It was, unfortunately, the era of privatization—capitalism had been called upon to fix the problems of collective security in Terran Space, and the forward base at Heifong V was pegged to be sold to a private security company, or P.S.C., to his displeasure. In actuality, it didn't mean that much of a change—the P.S.C. would cover the expenses of maintaining the facility, while the Space Forces continued staffing the local task force with sailors, officers and marines. In return, the company typically received both payment from the military along with various territorial perks and even unofficial access to military hardware and technology, alongside with lucrative contracts for shipbuilding. But Alan was a man of honor and a believer in tradition—a reactionary, as the corporate types dubbed him—and was unimpressed the second he got his first look at the company in question.

**Angel Links, L.L.C.**

A limited liability corporation. "We've sold our honor to a bunch of enterprising capitalists," were his first words upon transferring to the station. Another tactical officer, Senior Lieutenant Duuz, a massive and rather imposing Saurian, apparently agreed. But they were both good soldiers, and played along.

"Collective security should not be a for-profit venture," he told Duuz, who growled an agreement.

"Unfortunately, we've been called upon to fix _your _problems." This came from a smiling businessman in a suit much nicer than the uniform Alan wore.

All the same, Alan made a point of carrying out his duties as diligently as possible, coordinating border defense, primarily against Acid-B Pirates who were making aggressive moves on Ban Guild Space, and the occasional outlaw who got a little too adventurous for their own good and hoped to profit from both sides. Outlaws and pirates were bad for different reasons—pirates because they wanted power and money, outlaws because they wanted 'freedom' and money, that is, the freedom to go wherever they wanted to and behave however they liked, in flagrant violation of the laws that kept the society from descending into chaos and military powers like the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire from blowing up entire space ports because the outlaws smuggled illegal weapons or narcotics from them. Alan had little sympathy for either, especially when it became his job to stop them.

"They're not stopping, sir," the officer at the sensor station aboard the _Nova 3_, a patrol ship, warned.

"Damn it." Alan grabbed his own handset on the bridge. "This is the Security Forces Ship _Nova 3_. Outlaw ship _Heaven's Peak, _you are ordered to decelerate onto the broadcasted vector and submit to inspection! This your last warning!"

He didn't wait this time. "Fire a warning missile, five hundred meters off their portside."

"Sir?"

"Just do it!"

The _Nova 3 _fired a fission torpedo from one of its multiple tubes, which exploded off a half-kilometer from the outlaws—close enough to scramble some of its electronics that weren't shielded enough and give it a good rattle.

"Arm forward rail guns, get ready to target their engines," Alan ordered. _Nova 3 _was his first command, and while it wasn't a match for a cruiser like the _Free Virtue_, he knew how to use what power it had.

The _Heaven's Peak _knew it too, apparently. Before they had their sublight engines destroyed, they submitted to inspection, which involved being towed back to the forward base and boarded.

It was a typical outlaw crew, technically blameless but reckless to the point of being felonious. The captain was Kai Feng (not his real name) and he had a crew of trusted childhood friends from one border world or another. He was smuggling, or 'transporting' as he called it, contraband—abandoned Ctarl-Ctarl weapons which he recognized immediately. An analysis of his AI system revealed he was to be paid about five tons of high-density dragonite, enough of the precious mineral to be worth nearly a million wong—frankly, overly generous given the value of equipment, and something that worried Alan, but he left it to the investigators.

It was an excellent find for him, though it was joined by another strange thing: an odd, opportunistic man by the name of Nguyen Khan, a USSA national and a tenured academic from the most prestigious institution in Ban Guild space. Frontier professors were a strange bunch, but Khan was strange even by those standards. He was actually being smuggled back_ from_ the Ctarl-Ctarl homeworld and had in his possession a plethora of photographic evidence and scientific data from, of all things, the ancient Aruba Reba Ruins. Strange, of course, but by no means illegal. Professor Khan was promptly released from custody, unlike the outlaws transporting him. What stuck in Alan's memory was the conversation they had shortly before he left holding.

"Tell me, Captain, do you consider yourself an adventurous man?"

"I have made a career in the Space Forces. In a time of war originally," he replied, while looking at the old-style chemical photographs Khan had taken.

"But you're not answering my question. I have no doubt you're a _brave _man, and one of honor. But are you _adventurous_?

Memories of his eleven-month captivity entered in his mind. "Not intentionally, no." Then he remembered he was the one supposed to be asking questions here. "Why do you care?"

He hunched over and grinned at Alan, sending a shiver up his spine. "Do you know anything about the 'Galactic Leyline'?"

Alan leaned over at him. "No, I've never heard of it."

That was the end of their conversation. He wouldn't hear the term 'Galactic Layline' for another ten years, longer actually. In the meantime, he carried on in a respectable manner for a Space Forces captain. He became romantically involved with a small-time actress, until he realized she was not only distantly connected to one of the New Hanoi mob families who were being hunted by the Heifong government, but also pyrokinetic. Alan did the most obvious thing: without a word, he boarded the _Nova 3 _and left on a three-month-long anti-piracy campaign. They were mopping up Ban Guild Pirates who were fleeing the Ctarl-Ctarl Navy into what they thought was the safety of Terran space, only to have their crippled ships blasted to pieces if they were in anything smaller than a destroyer. Not only was it effective, it kept him from the actress until she'd moved on and her mobster relations had lost interest.

He was more careful whom he associated with after that. He made many good friends, including a woman a few months older then he was, a graduate student from an affluent family, Trang Van Minh. They dated, and after she obtained her doctorate, they were engaged. They married two years into his posting at Heifong, after he came through on his promise to have fewer deployments and relinquish command of the _Nova 3_. People used to compliment the two of them, ranting about what a great, handsome couple they made. This was ironic, as their marriage would be over before the fifth anniversary of his coming to Heifong. It wasn't where he thought he'd be before he turned thirty, but at least one good thing came of his failed marriage: Minh's first son, and his only child, Trang Shekhar Hieu. When it became apparent their marriage was going to end, Alan endeavored to appear as reasonable and compliant during the divorce procedures so that he might still have a relationship with his first child, his genetic legacy to the universe.

Even still, he knew Minh's family, and was confident they'd raise "Shekhu" to be a good, respectable young man. In the first few months after his divorce, he did what every military man in his situation did: he threw himself into his career. In a funny coincidence at the same time, his old commander at Heifong Prime Naval Base had been disgraced in an internal investigation, and his web of civilian contacts and military operations promptly brought under review. The high-level operation organized by the Admiralty, relating to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, had to be restarted from scratch for reasons before his pay grade. As it happened, Alan could not simply volunteer to be transferred to a more active post, like another border sector—just two days before the Lunar New Year, _XXXX _T.S., he was recalled to Space Forces Ministry's headquarters on Terra. Within days, his dossier and all those accolades and awards for the Victoria campaign were buried in the archives, he discarded his blue uniform and any other physical evidence of his military career, and was being smuggled out of Terran Space. He remembered that first night, sitting on a folding bed in the cargo hold of another suspicious, unsafe outlaw ship, wearing a patterned poncho over a Nehru jacket.

Kai Feng—the same outlaw he'd captured years earlier out of Heifong V—grinned at him, now paid by the Space Forces in this covert operation.

"What do you want?"

"Just to let you know we've cleared Sol and underway. Destination…"

"Don't say it."

"Destination: Ctarl-Ctarl Prime."


	3. 24 Terran Standard Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_24 T.S. Years Ago  
30 Light Years from the Ban-Ctarl-Ctarl Border_

Alan Chandrasekhar was 28 years old, still quite young in his mind—of course, given that his parents and grandparents, who were from good, bourgeois households in the capital of the Tenpa Empire, had lived to their centennials or farther, he thought he had eighty years before old age took him. Everything else would be much sooner.

He was sitting in the cargo bay of Kai Feng's new Outlaw freighter, the tritely-named _Dangerous Game_. The Space Forces had destroyed his old one around the time he had first met Kai Feng, and the outlaw liked to brag that the payment for this current mission was what made obtaining the new one possible.

Chandrasekhar had bigger things on his mind. In a few days, he'd be crossing the border between the Terran Frontier and the edge of the Ctarl-Ctarl's expansive empire, in a region not dissimilar to his own deployment during the war. Finally, the details of the operation were made available: he was going undercover, as he suspected, though not as a human. Instead, he was posing as a young Ctarl-Ctarl émigré returning to his homeworld after a year of house arrest in the U.S.S.A. To this effect, he'd been given a rather elaborate disguise: sharp false teeth, fake ears, and contact lenses. These were combined with his own hair, which he'd grown out longer than he'd ever had it and had permanently straightened, having what little facial hair he possessed treated chemically, and a week-long bath in synthetic Ctarl-Ctarl pheromones. The disgusting experience aside, he actually couldn't smell it afterwards, but was assured that it would be enough to ensure that his odor matched that of a Ctarl-Ctarl who'd lived among Terrans for a half-decade. The disguise actually seemed pretty convincing: Kai Feng's crew genuinely believed he was a Ctarl-Ctarl, and looking in the mirror, he actually liked a rather slight, if unusually tall, Ctarl-Ctarl youngster who'd experienced a few years of malnutrition recently.

"This could actually work." He peered at himself in his quarters, wearing his poncho—the Ctarl-Ctarl seemed to love ponchos, scarves, and cloaks—and saw a Ctarl-Ctarl with his face staring back. He would never pass as an Imperial soldier, but he didn't have to. And if he failed to convince the Ctarl-Ctarl Border Patrol, he expected they'd kill him immediately.

"Hey Captain! We're returning to normal space. You ready?"

"Of course I'm ready," he told Kai Feng, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice.

"If you say so."

The _Dangerous Game _dropped out of Sub-Ether Space almost dead center of the NGC 6162 globular cluster, around RSC 8403-3694-1-0-44 1, better known as Steyr I, a dark indigo and violet frozen gas giant with only a few tiny moons. Chandrasekhar was stunned: even in his career, he'd never been this deep in a globular cluster, never seen such a dense concentration of stars in every direction. The binary Steyr system was as close as you could get to the system of fourteen stars orbiting around the small black hole in the center of the cluster, while still orbiting a planet. Otherwise, it was fairly typical of government border transit worlds: too hostile for indigenous life, but stable enough for easy space travel, and easy to monitor. It had never been held by a Terran power, but if it had, it would likely serve the same function: hosting a Munchausen Sub-Ether beacon and transit path.

He suspecting one could see the central cluster from the military space station with the naked eye, the border crossing and immigration office manned by the Ctarl-Ctarl Border Navy. The station looked similar to a Ctarl-Ctarl warship, albeit more symmetrical and with concentric sensor rings expanding out from it.

"They've broadcasted the frequency for the general channel, tune to it and be ready to send our credentials!"

"I know that Captain," he growled on the bridge.

"And stop calling me that!"

While Kai Feng hissed under his breath, a Ctarl-Ctarl voice from the nearest ship, a speedy transport vessel, broadcasted. "_This is the Niburu Boribori out of the Heifong System._"

A quick response from another voice in Ctarl-Ctarl, this one sounding distinctly more military. "Acknowledged. Take vector to dock nine."

While the crew glanced around cryptically at the sound of the language, he put on an old-fashion headset. "This is the _Dangerous Game _out of the Suffolk System. Requesting docking instructions."

He hit the switch. "Transmit our credentials! Now!"

"Fine, fine…" Kai Feng mumbled as Ctarl-Ctarl script appeared in a window on his main display.

"Now we see if these credentials are worth the taxes we pay," another outlaw mumbled.

Finally a reponse. "_Acknowledged. Terran transport, take a vector to dock eleven_."

"Thank you," he replied in Ctarl-Ctarl.

The docking was painless enough. Even though the _Dangerous Game _was only transiting through the Empire to deliver one passenger, they still had to submit to a contraband check by the Imperial Border Navy while Alan was interviewed—maybe the last interview he'd ever live to do.

"Name?"

"Alan Rok Sheko-Sheko," he said, trying to like a genuine Ctarl-Ctarl in front of a coat-wearing military bureaucrat with thick glasses. Thankfully, she seemed to have zero interest in talking to him any more than she was obligated to.

"Your papers say you're immigrating back to Home, in the Empire."

"Correct, ma'am," he said, sounding a little too military. He had to dial that back. "I…I was under house arrest during the and after the War by the U.S.S.A. government in New Suffolk."

"What did you do there?"

"I was a teacher in a private religious academy for privileged Terran children."

She went through his documentation, all manufactured on Earth by the Space Forces Ministry's Special Operations Office. "How long are you staying here?"

"F-Forever, I hope. I don't care to return to Terran space."

"I can see why," she snorted. "Do you have family on Home?"

"I'm…not sure, ma'am." Incredibly, this was actually what he'd been coached to say.

"Where is your family in the Empire?"

"There's a Sheko-Sheko Horse Ranch on the edges of the Nochi-Nochi, on Stello Carinos."

She looked up. "They're not Travelers, are they?"

"Kata-Kata? No, absolutely not!" he insisted. He knew that the Kata-Kata Travelers were political outcasts, pariahs in the eyes of Ctarl-Ctarl society. Beyond that, he didn't know much.

"Of course," she mumbled, dragging her finger over her data screen. "Everything looks in order, though you'll need to update your passport as soon as you arrive on Home."

"I understand."

"Where's your luggage?"

They had him dump the contents of his small suitcase on an inspection table. They were appropriately meager:

About 40,000 Wong in Tenpa Empire gold coins—gold was valuable to the Ctarl-Ctarl for the same reason as it was to Terrans: it resisted corrosion, and could be used for electronics and jewelry. In that regard, it was actually more portable than dragonite, if not nearly as widely accepted.

A number of low-class Terran clothes, baggier than what a Ctarl-Ctarl would probably wear under a coat.

Some pretty typical Terran literature—Prefect's _Space Summed Up, _a three-piece Taoism primer, the first large volume of Marx's _Capital_, a Torah. There was also a blank notebook and pen set.

Various toiletries that were basically the same for Ctarl-Ctarl, though made of stainless steel instead of plastic.

A handheld electronic gaming device, with one cartridge: a Tenpa dating simulator game. He didn't play video games, but he was told you could use things like this to bribe young Ctarl-Ctarl, who loved imported video games.

Three bags of high-quality, very strong coffee from Brandenburg in the Einhorn Reich. This could also be used for bribes, though Alan expected the first thing he'd miss was Terran coffee.

A framed picture of the fictional Sheko-Sheko family.

After running everything under scanners, the immigration officer looked convinced. "You'll have to declare the coffee," she said, sniffing the coffee bags deeply. She clearly liked the smell—Alan wondered if he would already need to give out his first bribe. Instead she just pointed at the nearby display.

"Oh, of course," he said, tapping the screen. "Anything else?"

Holding a bag of coffee in her hand, she took a deep whiff and smiled. She then set it down, approached him, and sniffed. "You should buy some cologne. You still smell a lot like Terran, no offense."

_None taken. _"It might be my clothes. It'll never come out."

"No real loss," she said, eyeing him. A low-ranking officer with slicked-back hair and a work coat appeared in the room.

"Lady Versina, the outlaw ship looks clear. Nothing out of the order."

She took out his passport chip and tossed it into his hand. "Next time, save up for a ticket with a regular travel company."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And work on your accent."

"I...will."

Once he returned to ship and the hatch was closed behind him, he exhaled deeply. "Okay. _Next _stop, the Ctarl-Ctarl Homeworld."

Kai Feng was staring out at the densely-packed stars before him. "You know, this is your chance."

"Chance for what?"

"You could go wherever you want, you know? Make a new life for yourself. Now, I wouldn't have picked the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire of all places, but you could do it."

'Alan Sheko-Sheko' glanced at him, twitching his ears up and down, a common Ctarl-Ctarl expression of body language. "Unlike you, Captain, I have some faith in things greater than me. I don't just shirk my responsibilities when I've taken them on."

He felt the _Dangerous Game _rock free from the docking clamps and begin accelerating out of the planet's area of influence. "No one made me take this assignment."

He and Kai Feng didn't exchange many words until they completed their Sub-Ether jump to the Ctarl-Ctarl Homeworld.

Like any good Space Forces officer, Alan made an unconscious effort to memorize certain details of an unfamiliar planet upon the first time seeing it. Ctarl-Ctarl Prime, or Home as they called it, was described in considerable depth in practical every astronomy manual used by U.S.F. since Terrans first learned of the Ctarl-Ctarl centuries ago. Now a Terran could easily, if expensively, travel to HD 170397 7 (its Terran name) and remain there for a length of time, it was not really a mystery.

But it was new to Alan: a few parsecs from the violent, ancient pulsar located in the middle of the Nochi-Nochi Globular Cluster, Home was truly an alien world, even unusual in his experience. Returning to normal space, he could see a temperate terra, as Earth-like terrestrial worlds were called, that was much larger than Earth. It had a thick atmosphere, white cloud-cover, blue oceans with a greenish hue, and massive continents filled with hundreds of oddly-shaped lakes snaking around the equator. Orbiting around it, in the corner of his field of vision, was its moon: another life-sustaining world, albeit in miniature in a stable orbit around Home. A practically miraculous rarity in the universe. The other twelve planets orbiting the star ranged from water worlds to deserts to frozen gas giants, with hundreds of moons between them and no shortage of visible comets.

While he was staring, there was a buzzing on the general channel and a voice spoke.

"_This is Counter Admiral Dawid Clan-Clan,__ of the Royal Home Fleet Battleship _Orta Gono Gono_, wishing a good morning to all ships in orbit of the Homeworld. Welcome to Hashiyo-Hashiyo Prime, the capital of our great Empire and the cradle of all Ctarl-Ctarl across the universe. Processing of all ships will resume on full shifts for the rest of the day._"

"They must be set to capital time…" Alan mumbled.

"What the hell did they just say?" some crewman yelled as he ignored him.

Despite the warm message, the Ctarl-Ctarl approached arrivals with military efficiency: Alan barely had time to shake Kai Feng's hand before he scrambled through the dock as a number of sailors yelled at the ship to undock from the transport platform. He turned just in time to see the green bulkhead door shut followed by the docking tunnel hatch closing. Taking a short breath, he decided to turn around and see if he was going to die soon.

No biomedical devices.

No Taoist empaths.

Not even body X-ray scanners.

Nothing that could easily discern that he was no Ctarl-Ctarl, but a Terran imposter.

Alan stood in his poncho and Nehru shirt, luggage in hand, as a sailor noticed him and promptly pushed him in the right direction, where he found himself in a very short line. When came to the desk, the immigration officer stared at him as he silently handed over his data chip.

"Do you have anything to declare?"

Doing his best to hide his Terran accent, he exhaled.

"Just three bags of coffee."


	4. Hashiyo-Hashiyo 191

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_Hashiyo-Hashiyo 191  
Doyo Ward, North Dovov, Capital Province, The Homeworld, Ctarl-Ctarl Empire_

Alan Sheko-Sheko, as he made a point of calling himself at all times, occupied a small one-person flat on 97th Street, on a small ward in the a bedroom community called North Dorov, on the very edge of the Capital Province. He hadn't taken the Space Forces' warnings that seriously, and as a result, Home's unwelcomed higher gravity left him lying on his back, feeling perpetually exhausted. It was aggravated by the higher atmosphere pressure, which made every breath a small but tiresome ordeal.

Home as in the approximate center of what he learned was called the "Inner Periphery" of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, the cosmopolitan, densely-populated part of their "Holy Realm" that featured a number of heavily terraformed and industrialized worlds, where most of the citizenry lived. Beyond that, there was a huge zone of space the Empire claimed, the "Outer Periphery" that stretched across the galactic disk, from just outside the Ban Guild to the supermassive black hole in Sagittarius A*, all of which the Empire claimed through military conquest and imperial rite. As a Space Forces captain, his experience and knowledge dealt with the side of the Empire facing Terran space—the opposite side, reaching into the galactic core, was a mystery to him, and of no real value to Terrans. The story was that the Ctarl-Ctarl had fought the ancient Logans for it, back when they were a spacefaring empire.

That didn't mean much to him. His three-room apartment had two windows, one of which he could see out of if he put his futon on the bedroom desk and stared through it, which was all he could do that first week. 97th Street was a working-class neighborhood, where the Ctarl-Ctarl proletariat went about their humble lives, letting their children play kickball in the streets and walk their dogs.

He would add that the dogs surprised him: Ctarl-Ctarl loved dogs. They were easily the most popular pet. Apparently, along with horses and a few other Earth mammals, Ctarl-Ctarl had imported huge numbers of _Canis lupus familiaris _from Earth, and continued to import them, which had interbred with the domestic Ctarl-Ctarl wolves. Those wolves were probably horrifying things, but actual Ctar-Ctarl dogs came in a bunch of sizes, almost all of which looked like dogs from Terran space.

"Of course, dogs are a perfect match for Ctarl-Ctarl. For what are Ctarl-Ctarl to the average canine besides shorter, tougher Terrans who can actually match a dog's energy?" he explained to his digital recorder.

This wasn't a vacation. Alan was in effect a Terran sleeper agent in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, part of a network that stretched across Home and, allegedly, from the bottom to the top of Imperial society. Of course, he hadn't been given any orders, or made any contact with other agents, and had been warned that it might take months or longer before he received any such orders.

There was a knock on his door. He knew it was almost immediately, but a voice confirmed it anyway.

"Mr. Alan? Mr. Alan! Are you in there?"

It was his neighbor, Ms. Vera Tomoro-Tomoro. Tomoro-Tomoro was a young woman, probably younger than he was even, whom you instinctively called "Miss" nonetheless. She as a single mother, which was the only reason she'd live in this apartment block. Alan wasn't certain, but he didn't think she was a widower—more likely, the biological father wasn't 'in the picture'. All the same, she had twins—a boy and girl—who were toddlers. Single childbirths were less common without medical assistance. And she was insufferably friendly.

"Mr. Alan! Hello?"

Making an effort, Alan crawled to his feet, fixed his Nehru shirt and glasses, and stumbled over to the door. He struggled to open it: the apartment had _really _heavy doors that were hard to open. Finally, he opened it, to see Vera standing there. Vera was a decent-looking woman, even prett by Ctarl-Ctarl standards, and always seem to wear a sleeveless sundress with a frilly apron over it.

"Mr. Alan!"

"Yes, Ms. Vera. I'm here. As I am every day," he explained in Ctarl-Ctarl politely. "How can I help you?"

Alan promptly stumbled away from his door and plopped into a chair. Vera took this as an invitation to enter, as always.

"I just wanted to see if you were alright, you seem…kind of ill."

"I know that, Ms. Vera. Just like yesterday."

She looked around. "Well, you can understand why I'd be worried. This place isn't really isn't healthy for you…"

Vera was referring to the fact that he owned no furniture except what had come with the flat. That it was completely barren and devoid of décor. Apparently, Ctarl-Ctarl thought this was weird and not just typical bachelor behavior.

"Yes, I know. I'm going to change that eventually, I've just been busy, with other things," he told her, hoping Vera didn't realize he was lying. He foremost responsibility was to keep a low profile, one would think that spending all day in bed would qualify. It did not, so he decided to change the subject.

"Miss, is there something I can help you with?" Even to a Terran, it was pretty obvious that Vera wanted something.

Vera explained as she literally pulled him over to her apartment. "I need you to watch Lena and Lennie. Something came up at work and I couldn't call a sitter. Don't worry, there's nothing to it!"

_Give me some credit. I raised a son. _"Of course, whatever I can do to help."

It wasn't really applicable to the population of Home as a whole, or even the city, but the neighborhood Ctarl-Ctarl were the trusting type. Aside from a few complaints that he smelled strange, no one had a second thought about him. He was just some expat who'd been detained by Terrans during the war, a nobody.

"Now remember, Mr. Alan is…not very healthy, so you must not play rough with him," Vera told her wide-eyed kittens.

A fragile nobody.

"Is Mr. Alan sick?" one of the two—he wasn't sure which one, they were young enough to be identical—cooed loudly.

"Will we get sick?" the other one cooed.

"No, no. Mr. Alan isn't sick."

"He smells kind of _funny_."

"Lena! Shush! Mr. Alan is your elder, he is entitled to your respect!"

_That doesn't sound like how I talked to Shekhu when he was that age_, he thought, pretending not to hear them from the armchair he was sitting in. Vera's apartment was typical of a Ctarl-Ctarl—big potted plants, fish in a bowl, portraits, overall very busy. No picture of the father though…

"Now promise me you'll give him that respect!" she demanded.

"Yes, mama," the both said in unison.

Vera promised to return "in a few hours," so Alan sat in front of the videoscreen and watched broadcast television—something the Ctarl-Ctarl shared in common with humans. Sure enough, the children kept their promise to their mother. It didn't take long for Alan to realize that Ctarl-Ctarl toddlers were uncharacteristically disciplined and obedient: instead of running around screaming or acting like children, they sat quietly in the corner playing with wooden building blocks. When they got bored of that, they filled in a coloring book that had pictures of Imperial warships, taking care to stay within the lines, even if their color selection was rather poor. When they grew bored of _that_, they roughhoused—the kittens were allowed to wrestle, even bite each and scrape at each other, until they got tired and took a nap.

Alan didn't move from his chair. Gravity still made him feel about forty percent heavier and the pharmaceutical stimulants he'd stuck himself with daily didn't help that much. He was about to nod off when he realized the twins were standing in front of him. It took him a second to realize he'd actually fallen asleep and napped even longer than the kittens had.

"H-How long was I asleep? What time is it?"

One of the twins obediently pointed at the clock. He'd slept for four hours—the guilt of parenthood stabbed at him. "I-I need to get you some food. Vera doesn't look like she's still nursing you, so I'll assume you eat solid food. Follow me," he ordered.

Different species aside, Vera's kitchenette definitely reminded of a single mother, as oppose to his. He opened the refrigerator, which was packed like a military locker.

_So, the obvious thing is that I don't eat like a Ctarl-Ctarl, and do not know what kittens normally eat. _Spotting something in the corner, he reached it and pulled out what look like a slightly small ostrich egg. "How about eggs? You _koyoko_ eat eggs, don't you?"

Turning, he almost jumped back to see the two twins staring at him, with their wide, green-blue eyes and their bluish-grey hair. They both wore unisex children's smocks, but their hair was parted on opposite sides. For a second, he had the terrible, and terribly ridiculous, thought that he'd been made.

"What?" he finally asked.

"What was it like with the Terrans?" one of them, probably Lennie, asked.

He made his fake ears twitch. "Difficult. I was a prisoner. But I don't blame them, they didn't know better at the time."

"What were the like?" the other cooed.

He stumped past them in the high gravity, snatched a bowl from a drawer, and began cracking the four eggs he'd held in his arms one by one. "What do you mean? They're Terrans. They're tall, kind of soft, and sometimes fat."

"I heard they look a lot like us."

_Like you have no idea_. "Some of them do. Their women…I mean, Terran girls…only look like us when they're young. It's complicated." He began stirring the bowl with a wooden spoon.

"I heard lots of girls mama's age go to the Terrans."

"What do you mean, 'go'?"

"To dance and stuff."

He slammed the bowl down on the marble counter—even poor housing like this had marble counters, the Ctarl-Ctarl seemed to use marble the way Terrans used laminated wood—and turned around. "Right, enough of this. Wash your hands and nails and get ready to eat."

"Yes, Mr. Alan!" they both cooed.

Alan grunted once before grabbing the biggest pan he could lift and proceeding to cook the biggest omelet he had made since his days a naval cadet. "Does your mother have any cheese?" he called out.

"What's…'cheese'?"

"Nevermind. I'll just put some ham in it."

It took a half-hour to cook it, but sure enough, the children were scrubbed, cleaned and sitting when he brought the huge pan to the small table. "Show me your hands!" he commanded.

They held their small, brown hands at him, open palmed.

"Good, you can eat," he said, sitting in the remaining chair at the table.

Alan expected them to dig in immediately; once again he was surprised. They both stood on their chairs, then turned to the wall and put their hands to their head, saluting.

"_We thank you, Your Imperial Majesty, Empress of the Ctarl-Ctarl and Sovereign of the Sacred Nation, for this meal, and for the Empire that protects our being. We also thank the soldiers, sailors and officers who guard our Empire across the galaxy_." Half way through, Alan caught on and jolted, saluting in the direction of the large portrait that hung over the door, a photograph of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empress.

"Grown-ups don't have to do it, Mr. Alan."

"I knew that," he mumbled, sitting down and eating a mouthful of ham-and-egg omelet. "Just shut up and eat."

It was very late, and the streets had cleared, when Vera returned. Alan woke up on the couch, finding that the kittens had slept against him, atop the blanket he'd wrapped himself in, and instinctively pushing them away. Vera's eyes twinkled at the sight.

"I served them dinner."

"I can't believe you're a bachelor, Mr. Alan."

"Believe it," he told her, struggling to his feet again. He noticed Vera's attire: a scarf over what looked a little like a cocktail dress. It was actually much more modest than what Ctarl-Ctarl waitresses typically wore in Terran space.

"Were they any trouble?"

"Not at all. I'll be going."

"Oh…would you…like to stay for coffee, or…?"

He had a faint inkling of where this was going and didn't like it. "No, I don't drink coffee. Good night, Ms. Vera."

Alan was out of the door before she had a chance to respond. He plodded back to his flat and was about to open the door when his military training returned, taking the place of Ctarl-Ctarl omelets and child-rearing.

He carefully opened the door and closed it after him. "A green paper card in the doorframe. A single light on, flickering just before I reached the door. The very faint whine of a comm jammer."

"You remember your signal codes," a voice complemented him in Ctarl-Ctarl. Sitting in his bedroom, by the open window, was another Ctarl-Ctarl—or rather, a Terran impersonating a Ctarl-Ctarl.

"I would hope so…" he said, egging him for a name.

"Gregory." He took a deep breath. "Is that Reich coffee?"

"You know your Einhorn coffee," he said, complimenting him. "I'd offer you some, but I need it to last."

"Of course. I just wanted to praise your taste in beverages, even if your taste in décor could use some work."

"I'm still working on that," he said, letting himself fall into a chair.

"You're getting comfy with your neighbors. Good choice. It won't fool the Interior Ministry or Central Security, but no cop'll think the Ctarl-Ctarl down the hall who babysits for her is a foreign spy."

He rose up easily from his seat on the floor, reached into his cloak, and presented him with a folded envelope. "Vacation's over, professor. Time to serve Earth and the species."


	5. Hashiyo-Hashiyo 192

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_Hashiyo-Hashiyo 192  
Victory Square, Imperial City, Capital Province, The Homeworld, Ctarl-Ctarl Empire_

It took several weeks before he was able to do anything worth remembering. The Ctarl-Ctarl New Year passed, with huge celebrations that made the streets totally impassable, with military parades and trade unions and scantily-clad sword dancers. It was all very impressive, but he'd seen it before on video. Being there in person was just much louder, and much longer.

After he overcame the planetshock and became a functioning individual, Alan Sheko-Sheko had his assignment to do. He was now part of the kitchen staff at the Doridori Officer's Club on Victory Square, a massive city square inside the Imperial City. The whole Imperial City was practically a giant architectural set piece built by the Ctarl-Ctarl centuries ago, celebrating a few hundred generations of Imperial military glory, with massive concrete and obsidian palaces and complexes erected in something that reminded Alan of grand socialist or even classical architecture, with massive avenues lined with hundreds of thousands or even millions of smallish trees, monumental architecture as far as you could see.

Alan was told that the square was actually just over a million square meters, making it twice as big the largest square in Terran Space, in ancient Beijing, and that the whole Imperial City had been built and rebuilt multiple times, including once in the "Warring-States Period" centuries ago, when it was wiped out by nuclear weapons.

None of this impacted him: he scrubbed plates and bused tables at the Officer's Club, which overlooked the very large Victory Obelisk in the center of the square, at the end of an avenue leading to the Triumph Tower. It was not a bad job, even though it took military discipline to avoid getting yelled at. After all, he was not a Ctarl-Ctarl but a Terran, and even as he had managed to overcome the high gravity and atmosphere pressure, he still had to draw as little attention to himself. Being quiet wasn't a bad way to do it, no one seemed to care if a busboy was "too quiet."

His mission was simple: his position would allow him limited access to rather high-ranking officers in the Ctarl-Ctarl armed forces. Not to assassinate them, as he initially thought: that was totally impossible short of carrying an explosive and blowing himself up and the Ctarl-Ctarl did occasional security checks of the staff. And even that might not work on a so-called "Immortal Ctarl-Ctarl." Instead, he was supposed to secure genetic material in the form of glasses and dishware, that he would pass onto his contact, Gregori, in "the Center," the Space Forces' clandestine operation.

He'd spent weeks preparing, integrating himself into the staff, putting himself beyond reproach. Actually, the U.S.F. would never allow an émigré from enemy space to work in an officer's club, but the Ctarl-Ctarl did not care, making his job much easier that it might have been. Even then, it wasn't going to be a cakewalk.

It was the eight day of the second month, and he was working on tables before the lunch rush in the first class dining room. It was reservations only, and mostly empty, as the three 'targets' entered. He could never forget the three names belonging to his first clandestine mission in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire:

_Deputy Governor Margo Volot-Volot, of the Greater Horizons Sub-Province. _

_Lieutenant General Ismail Bukha-Bukha, deputy commander of the 211__th__ Shock Army, of the Imperial Army._

_Counter Admiral Dawid Clan-Clan, commander of the _HIMS Orta Gono Gono, _a battleship in the Royal Home Fleet._

All three men arrived in military dress—dark indigo uniform greatcoats with polished gold belts and shoulder guards and collars. The "civilian" governor was the eldest, clearly middle-aged, while Admiral Clan-Clan looked to be transitioning between what the Ctarl-Ctarl called "early" and "late" adulthood. He was actually a very handsome man, with a dark complexion and shoulder-length dark hair, and chiseled, supremely confident features. He seemed like he'd have been more at home being an actor than a naval officer of some prestige.

Both military men bowed deeply in front of the governor, either out of rank or seniority, who then shook their hands casually.

"Thank you both for coming, I don't have much time on Home."

"Of course, governor," Clan-Clan assured him.

The three of them took a table along the wall underneath a table Alan couldn't make out from his angle as he quietly cleared a table.

"Dawid, dear boy, how is your son?"

"He's doing well, though to be honest, I wonder if he has it in him to be a naval cadet."

"He isn't doing well?"

Clan-Clan looked upset. "He's got a good head on his shoulders, and a mind for details and thinking, but...I don't think his heart is into it. He's a good boy though, he'd never object. We'll see him in the Academy before long."

"Poor lad. You can't ask any more than that," Bukha-Bukha told him.

"No, I can't."

"You see, dear boy, this is why you don't just have one child. Forget your good family name, your lineage, and your duty. You can't ask a child to do more than everything. It can't be done. You should have more, quickly. At least two more."

Clan-Clan laughed at what Alan thought was an uncomfortably candid remark as a waiter approached and began pouring tea. "Well, you're in agreement with my dearest Ayesha. But it's not necessarily up to her."

_Then _there was an uncomfortable silence, just as Alan left with his dishware. When he returned, he saw the three men enjoying their hot cups of what looked like black coffee.

"Have a girl, that's what I say," Bukha-Bukha told his comrade. "A good, proud daughter with the fire you need for a military career. You can teach discipline and control, you can't teach enthusiasm and spirit."

"It's worked out quite well for you…twice?" Clan-Clan asked.

Bukha-Bukha slurped his coffee a little loudly and held up three fingers. "Three. And while I'd cut my heart out for any of my five sons, I know those girls will offer far more to the Empire than they will."

"Easy for you to say, Bukha-Bukha. You and your wife are good breeding stock, from good working-class families." He sighed. "You know the Terrans say we baby our children too much? We have too many of them and we're too easy on them. All the government programs and stipends."

"I've heard the Terrans don't have such a thing as 'paternity leave'," Bukha-Bukha admitted.

The governor snorted. "Please. I've heard the Terrans don't care for their children until they're old enough to form cognizant sentences, and if what I know of Terran child mortality is correct, I can hardly say I blame them," he growled, raising his hand. "Look at that painting."

Just as he made the nearby table for the next guests, Alan snuck a glance. It was a snowy plain, devoid of trees, with lines of soldiers in white camouflage shuffling on skies. In the center was an ancient battle tank with a small turret and gun, with several soldiers riding on that.

"What is that?" Clan-Clan asked, confused.

"The battle of a place called 'Moscow', in an ancient Terran country called the 'Soviet Union'. A battle on Earth, one that changed their history forever. It turned the tide for a people who fought an enemy as ruthless as any we could imagine, soft, fragile Terrans who lost twenty million men and women without so much as nuclear weapons."

"I can't imagine Terrans killing twenty million anything without nuclear weapons," Bukha-Bukha admitted as he glanced through the menu. "They're saps, but they're not that soft, not at all. They have to enjoy killing as much as we do to do that."

"Interesting story, governor, but ancient history," Clan-Clan pointed out.

"Perhaps, perhaps," the governor acknowledged as a pair of waiters arrived with their meals—multiple huge bowls of soup for each of them, complemented by plates of roast fish and large loaves of bread. Predictably enough, they scarfed down the food rapidly, only exchanging a few peasantries amid giant gulps of food.

Alan was counting on that though. He made his way back to the kitchen, where he waited patiently. He didn't have to wait long. The three of them finished their meals and left a good mood, exchanging more light-hearted jokes. Alan quickly his made to his table, where he was reminded that the Empire was not a tipping culture, and began loading as many of the bowls as he could but taking care to take all three cups. Carting them off, he brought them to his sink, and then got to work. Under his apron, he concealed a number of medical strips, which he wiped on each of the three cups. Under his apron, he put the three strips into plastic specimen bags, then returned to work.

"Alan! Would you like to pick up an addition shift?"

"No, I enjoy being poor!" he yelled back, scrubbing away.

It was not his last encounter with Admiral Clan-Clan. The younger admiral regularly hosted lunches with various civilian and military leaders, having discussions of no strategic value but still meeting with important persons. Over the next few weeks, Alan actually collected genetic samples from more than two-dozen different military officers and government leaders, using this same method. There was no camera at his position in the kitchen and until one day, he never encountered any problems.

With his usual silence and diligence, he cleared another table as Clan-Clan said goodbye to his guests, an important academic from the Central Imperial University and department chief from the Ctarl-Ctarl Intelligence Bureau. Then the worst thing happened.

"You don't happen to have a light, do you?"

Alan almost jumped out of his apron as he turned. Clan-Clan, still smiling, still handsome, was holding a small metal pipe in his hand. _I should have hummed. That was my mistake. Ctarl-Ctarl make noise while they work, even unintentionally. _

"I'm very sorry, sir, I don't."

"That's fine," he assured him, letting him turn back and keep clearing the table, trying not to appear to be rushing. He could feel Clan-Clan's stare on his back, but when he turned again, he realized Clan-Clan was actually staring at the painting. Somehow, he didn't feel better.

"It makes you think, doesn't it?"

"…think, sir?"

"That painting. Or maybe it doesn't, it's not as though Terran warfare is your business."

He gave a sigh, and Alan made sure he wasn't there when he turned back. That was a close encounter that could have gone very wrong, but he was able to salvage.

Gregory was not as pleased and let him know as much when they met at a public park bench on the outskirts of the capital, far from prying eyes. "That was careless."

"It wasn't careless. It was my job, they don't let me just hang around the kitchen not doing anything."

"Don't let it happen again," Gregory warned him. "You know…"

"I know what'll happen. I spent a year as a prisoner of war, don't lecture me," Alan countered.

He didn't really get along with Gregory, but he wasn't supposed to. Gregory had been infiltrated into the Empire during the war, one of the first U.S.F. sleeper agents. Alan didn't know, but he imagined he had some reputable job in the private sector, with employees and an office and so forth.

The genetic material, as he was told, was going to be smuggled out of the Empire and back into Terran space, where it would be analyzed to provide the Admiralty with a breakdown of the health and physical state of many crucial Ctarl-Ctarl officers, which had obvious value to the military and civilian governments along the border zone. Gregory and the Center pulled him off the posting, though he kept scrubbing dishes, since it would look rather strange to be a Ctarl-Ctarl and unemployed. Even transient Ctarl-Ctarl took multiple jobs, and likewise, if the Ctarl-Ctarl could hire someone to do something, no matter how small or redundant, there was social pressure to do so. They didn't have the best economic sense, but they did have full employment. He didn't see any paupers or homeless in the capital, even as people were packed at densities that would match metropolises on Earth. It was clear that the Ctarl-Ctarl police arrested the homeless and transients, under the wide charge of "hooliganism", where they compelled them to get less enjoyable jobs or accommodations.

_If they don't have work for me, fine. Stealing Ctarl-Ctarl spit wasn't really what I came to the Empire to do. _Even with that in mind, it did not take so long for boredom to set in. Even when he was able to function normally on Home, there wasn't much to do. Once he got permission from the Center, he briefly visited Little Terra, the popular name for a ward in the Imperial City where Human expats lived and work, practically all of them working at religious orders or in the food-preparation industry. It was a relief to see other Terrans, and even more of a relief to see that, in their eyes, he was a Ctarl-Ctarl. Other times, he would sit at a café or a grocery just outside Little Terra, eating cuisine from Earth adapted for the Ctarl-Ctarl palette, which really just meant larger portions and spicier. He was actually able to find an Indian Restaurant with respectable rice and curry you could buy in small portions. He even spoke Hindi with the owner, who was astonished to find a Ctarl-Ctarl who could speak it with such a minute accent.

Mr. Restaurateur was chatting with him after the dinner rush, telling him about how he didn't like going home because his Terran neighbors were deacons at a Christian Academy, and were more than a little pushy about their faith, which is why he didn't close shop earlier. Listening to him, Alan had to admit that, as boring as things were, he could have been a lot worse off. It was not a bad life, living on a allowance and low wages, in a tiny apartment, the life of a bachelor. He didn't want to live like this for his whole life, he wanted to return to a military career, but this wasn't the most difficult step in that process.

Of course, it wasn't meant to last, and as happened with these sort of things, it came to an end much sooner than he expected. Afternoons sitting in his apartment, teaching himself the Ctarl-Ctarl written language, practicing his phonetics, playing that boring dating video game and walking by Little Terra, it ended as abruptly as it began.


	6. Autumn, Hashiyo-Hashiyo 192

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_Autumn, Hashiyo-Hashiyo 192  
Doyo Ward, North Dorov, Capital Province, The Homeworld, Ctarl-Ctarl Empire_

It started out innocuously enough. Alan Sheko-Sheko believed he had mentally prepared himself for all of the likely scenarios that might compromise his cover identity—and in a sense, he might have done that. The event that did ruin everything was one that he couldn't have possibly predicted. For starters, it involved strippers, which automatically made it one of the stupidest ways his cover could have been compromised.

It was an autumn in the Capital Province, colder and dryer than the same season in Heifong's Center. By chance, the closest thing he had to a friend was Mr. Restaurateur—he never used his actual name, for one reason or another—who ran the Indian Restaurant in Little Terra. Mr. Restaurateur never gave any indication that he realized the man he called his "best customer" was actually a fellow Terran; if he did, the consequences would be nearly as severe as they would have been for Alan. If he was lucky, he could expect 'merely' a few years in an off-world high-security prison. Alan actually felt bad about it if he thought about it; then again, he also liked eating Bengali curry that didn't make him feel like he was defecating his small intestines through his colon after eating it, which was the typical effect if he ate Ctarl-Ctarl curry without passing out from the flavor.

Mr. Restaurateur was a man of simple tastes: he liked to watch Ctarl-Ctarl _Cuju_, which was lot like the great Terran sport football, complete with a round white ball, though women's teams were more popular than men's. He liked to drink, both Terran and Ctarl-Ctarl alcohol, which actually not that much stronger than hard liquor. And he liked to look at women, both Terran and Ctarl-Ctarl. His wife, Mrs. Restaurateur, had become a born-again Christian and "drove him insane" he claimed. According to Mr. Restaurateur, his wife prayed for immortal soul, and believed that if he remained a secular, semi-practicing Taoist, he was eternally damned. Somehow, Mr. Restaurateur used this to justify the occasional visit to an all-Ctarl-Ctarl strip club that was popular with young men, and a few young women, in Little Terra. It was actually kind of fascinating hearing him describe his "dilemma" to someone he genuinely believed to be the product of a different culture, even before Alan considered his own failure of a marriage and wondered if it would failed faster if he'd done the same thing.

Alan would have been lying if he claimed he didn't find the Ctarl-Ctarl dancers sexually alluring. When he first arrived on Home, he'd actually found he was acutely terrified of _all _Ctarl-Ctarl, women and men alike, since any Ctarl-Ctarl could probably pull his windpipe out through his neck, and might if they discovered his identity. But even before this, he knew Ctarl-Ctarl women carried themselves differently than Terran women, especially to a once-married man, he felt. There were the stereotypes and the assumptions that survived even the rather strong Ctarl-phobia that Terrans in the border worlds felt. The Ctarl-Ctarl were, thanks to military mobilization, slow aging, and rapid reproduction, on average in better physical condition than Terrans. The average age of Ctarl-Ctarl on Home, and throughout the Empire, was lower than the aging Terran population, due in part to reproductive rates. Ctarl-Ctarl boys were short, slender, with long hair and big, expressive eyes. Ctarl-Ctarl girls were short, slender, and well-endowed. The Ctarl-Ctarl had a unified dancing tradition, as celebrated as any other form of entertainment. They actually weren't big on _exotic _dancing, since Ctarl-Ctarl dancing was inherently physical, even sexual, and didn't involve many clothes on men or women. But anywhere there were Terrans, Ctarl-Ctarl strippers seemed to rake in the cash, hand over fist.

Alan did this thinking on the subject during what became his last few weeks on Home. Mr. Restaurateur invited him to the club in Little Terra, where young women, having finished the last third of mandatory education, could work rather forgiving hours and not be arrested for hooliganism or delinquency. Alan wasn't an expert, but this club was apparently styled after similar clubs throughout Terran space, complete with blaring music and annoying strobe lighting.

"You know what I don't get?" Mr. Restaurateur yelled at him from their table.

"What?" Alan asked, having the strain to hear him.

"How none of your kind go to these things."

It took Alan a split-second for him to realize what that meant. He was correct: though the dancers, bartenders, and even the bouncer at the door were all Ctarl-Ctarl women, the entire clientele was Terran, or specifically, about 90% Terran men, most between the ages of 20 and 40. Even as a fake Ctarl-Ctarl, Alan stood out, in his Nehru shirt, coat, and long hair.

"You know, we have seductive dancing. The club scene just hasn't caught on in the Empire," he yelled back at him.

"I guess." Mr. Restaurateur leaned in and put a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, Alan. It's a special occasion, so want to treat you."

"Sure," he replied, assuming this meant another drink. Mr. Restaurateur made a gesture, and a very fit, very attractive, Ctarl-Ctarl woman in a thong and skimpy chest fittings came with a martini on a tray, which he took before thanking her politely in her tongue.

She looked at him oddly, then at Mr. Restaurateur, then at him again.

"Well, come on!" he goaded her.

She gave a wary sigh and Alan, almost falling out of his chair, realized Mr. Restaurateur had bought him a lap-dance. He suddenly became an expert on Ctarl-Ctarl conventions and realized that the stripper had probably never been asked to dance for another Ctarl-Ctarl of either gender, something that Mr. Restaurateur didn't realize. He proceeded to explain that, but between the loud music, the alcohol, and the stripper sitting on his lap, he wasn't as eloquent as he could have been.

"Uhhhh….my friend, we don't do that!"

It wasn't a great explanation.

"Alan, you are my best Ctarl-Ctarl friend. I want you to know that tomorrow, I am going to the local magistrate, and asking for writ to dissolve my marriage. My wife does not want to be married to a heathen who is going to burn in Hell, and I don't want to be married to a religious nutcase. So please, let me treat you to this."

The very fit Ctarl-Ctarl rolled her eyes so hard that Alan thought they might pop out of her head, then proceeded to stretch out her long legs and get very close to him. Without even thinking, he leaned back in his chair and tried to squirm his way out.

"Are you sure that is wise, my friend? What about your children?"

"They're grown up. Frankly, I think they will be happy to be rid of both of us," he said, staring at the dancer's nearby posterior.

More squirming. "Well, what about the restaurant?"

"It is all in my name. Ctarl-Ctarl lawyers are cheap, even good ones."

He sighed, trying to look Mr. Restaurateur in the eye, instead of the dancer's chest. "Mr. Restaurateur, I know I'm young and hardly a sage, but I've been through a divorce, and I don't think…think that…"

He grabbed the Ctarl-Ctarl by the shoulders. "Miss, could you please _stop_."

"Your friend isn't getting a refund," she told him pointedly.

"You're not getting a refund," he translated. "But besides that…"

"My mind is made up, Alan. You are young, you come from a strong, resilient people, you have your whole life ahead of you. I…just do not like my wife."

"My friend, I know that…" he began, before realizing the dancer was still waiting, legs apart, arms over around his head, as if waiting for further instructions. Holding her waist, he directed her to sit in the empty chair and continued. "My friend, I know that these seem like irreconcilable differences, but I think you're too tempted to take what you see as an easy way out. Maybe it's different Terrans, but I think you are so tired that you are putting out of your mind the good times you've had when your wife. You both came to a far-off world years ago, you made a life for yourselves together, you raised hardworking children…"

Alan realized that the Ctarl-Ctarl dancer was now leaning at him, resting her hands on her arms, her ears twitching periodically.

"I'm sorry, is there something else?!" he demanded.

"No, I was just curious."

After that, Alan did not go to another strip club _anywhere _for another twenty years, and even then, it was not by choice. He had no luck convincing Mr. Restaurateur to change his mind, especially when he realized that, by all appearances, he was simply a busybody well outside his element and interfering in things his had no business in. He enjoyed a few more mixed drinks from Mr. Restaurateur, watched the same dancer walk up to the stage and pirouette around a steel pole, just like any number of other Ctarl-Ctarl in clubs at Blue Heaven or Heifong. Having wasted a few hours like this, they parted ways and Alan wished Mr. Restaurateur the best of luck and happiness for the path he had chosen.

It was at that point where Alan, like any other club patron, decided to return home and rinse the smell of alcohol out of his ears. Already tipsy, though, he found himself taking the back entrance, walking past a pair of Ctarl-Ctarl twins making their way to the stage and grinning at them like the drunk loser that he was portraying (or actually was). He stepped out through the doors and realized he was on an unfamiliar street in Little Terra, overlooking a French restaurant.

Looking around, he saw three police officers, two men and a woman, in their military-style dark green fatigues and shoulder guards. In his stupor, he thought it would be a good idea to ask them for directions.

"That way, citizen."

"Thank you, constables," he said, bowing and stumbling away. He was still stumbling away when they went to door he had exited from, drew their batons and pulled their open-top crash helmets over their heads, and promptly stormed through the doors. What happened next wasn't clear to him—there was the sound of angry shouting, a scuffle, and Alan turned just in time to see the glass door knocked off its hinges and shattered against the pavement. He saw what he thought was a alcohol-induced delusion—one of the dancers, in the same attire though wearing a headband, leapt backwards through the door, followed by a male constable. The two exchanged rapid, quick punches, blurs really, as the dancer grabbed him and crushed him in a lamppost. The constable retaliated by delivering a stunning blow, knocking her back and into Alan.

The dancer tumbled and rolled, an amazing feat in high heels. Alan, on the other hand, nearly cracked his head against the railing along the sidewalk, bounced a little, and collapsed on the ground, bleeding.

When he woke up, the 'Kitty Kat Club'—the establishment's silly-sounding name—was surrounded by Imperial Metropolitan Police vehicles, lights flashing in the darkness, and he was being treated by a police medic. He was also missing his coat.

"Wh-What happened?" he asked.

"You were attacked by a criminal suspect," the nurse told him, with the sort of expression that seemed to suggest that since he was the kind of pervert who went to Terran strip clubs, maybe he deserved what he got.

By then, Alan was sober enough to realize the magnitude of what had happened. A nurse was treating him, tying his head in bandages. By some miracle, his fake ears and canines had not fallen out, but it was just a matter of time before someone, somewhere, realized those bandages were covered in Terran, not Ctarl-Ctarl blood. They had probably taken a blood sample from him as a matter of procedure. It might be hours or it might be days, even weeks, but they _would _find out that Alan Sheko-Sheko was a Terran sleeper agent.

He managed to hide his panic. If he fled now, they'd just realize something was wrong faster.

"Criminal suspect?" he asked.

"A Kata-Kata. She was one of the dancers."

"Kata-Kata?"

"You know, those rebel tribes. I thought they didn't allow their type on Home," she muttered.

Alan had a vague notion of whom the Kata-Kata were—centuries ago, they had rebelled against the Empire and been exiled off-planet.

"Did she get away?"

"It seems like it. Don't worry, we'll find her."

_Not before I do. _As soon as he could fob off the nurse with excuses and a promise that he'd visit a hospital the next day, he used the minicomputer concealed in his wallet to track his coat—or rather, the U.S.F. tracking beacon he'd sewn into the lining. The Kata-Kata woman had obviously concluded that fleeing through North Dorov in high heels and a thong was a surefire way to get attention, but she had stolen the wrong man's coat.

He gave himself a half-hour to get to his apartment, gather everything remotely sensitive, and toss it in his luggage. He thought he'd been quiet and was almost scared out of his wits when he spotted one of Ms. Vera's children standing in the breezeway.

"What are you doing here?! Go back to sleep!"

Lena, or perhaps Lennie, yawned, holding a stuffed rabbit in one hand. "Mr. Alan, what are you doing? Are you going on holiday?"

He was pressed for time. "Sort of. Here, I'll walk you back."

As he promised, he did so. "Give your mother my regards."

The child nodded and yawned, before vanishing back into his or her home. Another pang of parental guilt, for one reason or another. He swallowed it and sprinted in the direction of the beacon, which led him to a public park. He was confused until he realized what he was looking for was in a large, military-style tent set up near a pond.

"They're…like gypsies?" He gathered his courage and carefully strolled up to the tent. About a meter away, a pair of arms stuck out from the tent and literally dragged him in, and he found himself in the third unenviable situation involving an exotic dancer in that evening. The mostly-naked Ctarl-Ctarl had him in a headlock that he had no chance of getting out of.

"I don't know how you found me," she warned him menacingly and with an accent thicker than his. "But you are a stupid, stupid man."

"That's nothing."

"Oh, really? Why is it 'nothing'?"

He held up three fingers. "First, you came however many light-years to Home to become a _stripper _in _Little Terra._ Second, you are fleeing the police in a _tent_ in a _public park_."

Alan struggled to get a better look at her. It was indeed the same woman from before. "Third, if you kill a Terran, even a Terran illegal, you will only succeed in making yourself even more noticeable than you already are as a _stripper _in _Little Terra_."

For his efforts, he was rewarded by an expression of realization crossing her face, and she released him. He fell to the cloth floor of the tent like a sack of vegetables.

"Feel free to keep the coat."

She wrapped it a little tighter around her. "I will. You're a Terran?"

He tried to nod. "Believe me, you're not the first person I've fooled."

"What do you want, Terran?"

"Alan Sheko-Sheko," he corrected him. "And I want what you _must _have, if you're a Kata-Kata: discreet passage _off _this planet, before I end up in a government dungeon."


	7. Year of the Republic 414

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_Year of the Republic 414  
Doyo Ward, North Dorov, Capital Province, The Homeworld, Ctarl-Ctarl Empire_

Aside from the valuable lesson of avoiding beautiful Ctarl-Ctarl strippers, Alan Chandrasekhar learned a lot of things in the weeks that followed his cover being compromised.

The exotic dancer who knocked him on his face had a name, sort of. She was Cammy, and she was born into the Kata-Kata Travelers, an infamous group who had quite a few claims: they were the last independent Ctarl-Ctarl nation. They were the only true Ctarl-Ctarl republic, not having the constitutional head of state of a monarch. They did not use surnames, one of their many demonstrations of their commitment to the cause of equality. They claimed to be the only true democrats of their species. And they were more than a little weird, to put it mildly.

Fortunately for him, he felt, Cammy was not an anarchist or an anti-government terrorist or even really a dissident. She had left the Kata-Kata Homeworld hoping to train at an Imperial vocational school in, of all things, engineering in the power generation industry. Unfortunately, like the overwhelming majority of Kata-Kata, Cammy was born on a farm and all the vocational schools she was qualified to enter were inadequate for the needs of her community. By Imperial standards, she had a meager, utilitarian education, and whatever qualifications she might have possessed, they were unrecognized by the Imperial government.

What she did have were, she explained to him crudely, were long legs, large breasts, a pretty face and the ability to put her legs behind her head. Her own government, more interested in electrical engineers than exotic dancers, paid for her illegal passage to Home. So she became a stripper in Little Terra, where she made more than enough money to afford a much nicer apartment than the one Alan had abandoned, along with the bribes she had to pay in order to have someone at a local school overlook her lack of citizenship. She actually lived much better than Alan had, with a little cottage on the outskirts of the city that apparently reminded her of home.

Like Alan, her arrangement came to an end that faithful night, when the public official she was bribing was investigated, and revealed her place of employment the police, who raided it. No more stripper job, and no more cover for Alan either, after she nearly fractured his skull.

There were probably thousands, even tens of thousands, of her fellow Travelers in the Capital Province alone, doing much the same thing. Her great-grandparents, Cammy claimed, fought the young Hashiyo-Hashiyo Dynasty with bullets and bombs. But in the last century, people had become more "civilized", and the Kata-Kata went from a threat to a social pariah that the other hundreds of billions of Ctarl-Ctarl throughout the Empire chose to ignore. Still existing, Cammy said, was a victory in its own right. When Alan thought of the Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Marianna IV, daughter of the dynasty who bore her name—she was Cammy's age, and a life-size poster of her handsome features, long hair and military greatcoat adorned untold numbers of walls across every city, not to mention a portrait in practically every household, as though she were Lenin or George Washington. There were other posters too—one in particular, which was solid blue with the national coat-of-arms at the top in white, followed by a few lines in Ctarl-Ctarl.

**REPORT INIQUITY**

**AND**

**CARRY ON**

Alan thought it referred to spies like himself. In actuality, the Kata-Kata were more deserving a headache. Cammy proved that when she led him to the local Kata-Kata safe house, another cottage in the countryside outside North Dorov.

"They will have raided my cottage by now."

"I would have imagined. Is there anything I should know?"

"Don't talk politics with them."

As it happened, her fellow Travelers were not supposed to be very fond of the Space Forces either. Kata-Kata took an oath of nonviolence on their homeworld, Harvest, which did not apply anywhere else. Kata-Kata were as headstrong as any Ctarl-Ctarl. So they did not participate in the War, and they did not expect assistance from the Terran states either.

She told him as much as they walked along the highway. "Terrans are as bad as the Empire. Instead of war, you corrupt and steal. Especially the Outlaws."

"One could say that the Kata-Kata are simply Ctarl-Ctarl Outlaws."

She stopped, then punched him in the side strong enough to drop him. He caught up as quickly as he could. The nondescript country cottage, built with a long, curved roof that reminded him of traditional architecture in Kei Guild space, apparently contained a number of her fellow Travelers.

Cammy entered force, took off her coat, and immediately embraced the nearest Traveler, a young man Alan's age. Like seemingly all young Ctarl-Ctarl men, he was fairly handsome too, with a very dark complexion, long black hair and chiseled features. Alan was on a planet full of good-looking people, no wonder he had trouble fitting in!

"Comrade, you're alive. Thank goodness." He didn't seem to even notice she was naked except for some plastic fittings on her chest, a thong, and high heels. That, or the Travelers were too classy a bunch to draw attention to it.

"Thank you, my dearest comrade. No thanks to him," she snapped, looking at Alan as he crossed into the living room. Suddenly all eyes were on him.

"…who are you? What are you?"

There was no fooling that many Kata-Kata at once. They might have thought he was a bio-android from his smell. "I'm a Terran illegal," he explained truthfully.

"You mean a Terran _spy_."

He tried to change the subject. "Let's make it clear, _she _struck _me _in the middle of a police raid. I had no part in that."

"He knew I couldn't just kill him, it would be the death of us all. So I promised he could flee with us."

A Kata-Kata woman in the back, dressed of all things as an office lady, groaned and hissed at this revelation, then said something in a tongue Alan couldn't recognize.

"I know, I know, but did not Comrade Vora say to aid our brothers and sisters, even selflessly?"

Alan had no idea who this 'Vora' was, but was grateful she—probably a she—existed. The office lady hissed again, made an obscene gesture at Alan with her right hand, then sat on the floor, legs crossed.

Another Traveler, a dark-skinned silver-haired woman in what looked like an anachronistically old-fashion nurse uniform—a snug, high-collared pink one-piece dress that buttoned in the front and ended just above her knees—stood up from the table. "Well, we must get Cammy off world immediately anyway, the police will find her two days at most."

"And if she's here, they'll find all of us," a very young Kata-Kata, really an adolescent boy with light skin in a militaristic secondary school uniform, pointed out.

"Tommy is right!" another woman pointed out—this one was unusually beautiful, 'unusually' being the key word here. She wore a long, dark red robe with a white flower pattern on part of it, tied around her waist like a kimono, and her dark skin was interrupted by very thick white and red makeup on her face. Years later, Alan would learn that the Traveler was actually a sort of Ctarl-Ctarl 'geisha' or courtesan, part of the artistic revenue of a minor noble family. Broadly speaking, they were chaste and sat around playing stringed instruments and looking pretty; they were chaste out of deep concern for providing clearly-defined genetic lines among the noble families, apparently. "It might not even be safe for us to keep this safe house."

Cammy looked ashamed, crossing her arms over her chest. "I'm sorry."

"Cammy, you did the right thing," the one she had embraced, apparently the leader, insisted. "What good are safe houses if we don't use them?"

"I'm sorry, I did not mean to accuse Comrade Cammy of anything," she apologized quickly.

Even with their status as rebels, the Travelers demonstrated themselves to be a rigid, composed bunch, more so than your average capital province Ctarl-Ctarl, he noticed. Cammy, he learned, was actually considered something of an 'amateur', despite her ability to lightning-box with police constables and dance naked on a stage under strobe lights. Thus, her assignment was to remain in Little Terra unless she was going to her vocational school, where she strove to be a model student and _not _be known for having immature Terrans stare at her for hours at night. While Cammy sat sadly in the corner, the lot of them put their heads together to come up with a solution.

"We should have Cammy take the Judaic missionary shuttle. She can dress as a nun and him as a rabbi," Tommy, apparently the Kata-Kata cell's idea man, offered. "The Empire won't think to check their credentials so long a as they're departing and not arriving."

The leader nodded. "Maya, could you please get them dressed for that?" Maya, with all her makeup, promptly vanished into another room. Cammy, who was now using his coat as a rug, was lying on her stomach, legs in the air behind her head.

"I wanted to know, 'Alan', how did you find me? Obviously you didn't follow me with that blow…"

He felt the bandages on his head. "Correct." He stood up and approached her, reaching for the coat, and with a small pocket knife, reached down. Cammy didn't even blink—like most Ctarl-Ctarl he seemed to run into, she was not afraid of knives—as he cut a hole in the lining near her side, reached in, and pulled out the small military-grade tracking device he'd left in the coat. about the size of a half a pack of cigarettes cut lengthwise.

"Not much to it," he said, tossing the device at her, which she caught in her mouth before spitting out and looking at it. "Long range and untraceable to others. I take it you don't have much in the way of high-precision electronics on Harvest…"

"The Kata-Kata Democratic People's Republic," she muttered as she looked at the device.

"Right, the Kata-Kata Republic." Alan would have an unexpected crash course in political history soon—in the meantime, the Kata-Kata cell dressed him up in the black blazer, cassock and trousers of a 'Judaic' Rabbi, as the Ctarl-Ctarl called Jewish clergymen, originally trained by the first Terrans to arrive in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire after expeditionary armies, the missionaries, a few centuries ago. Even though Jewish Terrans didn't proselytize among other Terrans, apparently all of the big Terran Abrahamic faiths had missionaries on Home, but once you took the Terrans out of the picture, the faiths and traditions just merged together in a big mess that were vying for influence in society rather than conversions. Alan had seen mosques and churches and everything else in the province, and not only did the buildings look mostly the same, so did the clergy.

So, Alan packed up his favorite Nehru shirt, discarded his dirty trousers, and pulled on the pseudo-Jewish garbs. Not missing a beat, Cammy put on what looked a lot like a nun's habit, in the same black and white colors, over her workplace attire. Maya had to remind her to trade her high heels for more modest sandals, then wiped off the dancer's makeup.

"Do you think this will work, comrade?" Tommy asked the leader.

"I have no idea. By all accounts it should, but they look so ridiculous it might not."

"I told you not to wear a thong underneath the habit," he muttered to her.

Cammy used what he was certain was an expletive. "You said no such thing!" Apparently the joke was lost on her. They soon left the cottage, Cammy exchanging hugs and kisses with her comrades, grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him out before he could even give them his real name or even thank them for their assistance.

The two took a bus to a small local spaceport—a wise move, Alan admitted—where he followed Cammy's instructions of how to act like Ctarl-Ctarl clergy, which sounded an awful lot like instructions on how to behave like a Ctarl-Ctarl married couple. Brazenly, the two walked right up to the counter—the same counter that now featured a wanted poster bearing a very accurate rendition of Cammy with her makeup on—and she purchased a ticket off-world. The clerk behind the counter stared at them for what seemed like a painful eternity before he shrugged, stamped their fake passports—Alan's second fake passport—and handed them their boarding passes.

"So, we're not going directly to Harvest?" he asked when he felt it was safe.

"No, fool. We'll go to Ender, just past it. Now shut up," she mumbled as they walked through the spaceport's halls, trying not to look so obviously guilty.

They came to their terminal, and not a moment too soon, Alan felt. His heart sank when he saw the detachment of police at the other end of the area, questioning the waiting room population, person by person. Cammy noticed the same, dragging him directly to the gate.

"Oh no, it's closed. Something's wrong," he despaired quietly as they slowly approached in their green coats and white gloves and belts.

"I'm sorry, sir and ma'am," the spaceport official at the gate explained to them pointedly. "We're having some technical problems, so this spacecraft is departing early. You'll be able to catch the next one."

"No, no!" she snapped at him. "We have passes, open the gate and let us through!"

"What kind of ship leaves _early _because of technical problems?" he whimpered to himself.

"I'm _sorry_, _miss_, but I can't do that." By now, both Cammy and the spaceport official had bared their canines and were locked in a death stare.

"Says _who_?" she growled.

"Says the _spaceport authority miss_," he growled back.

Cammy looked like she was about a half-minute away from grabbing the spaceport official and literally tearing him apart, cheap suit and all. Alan looked at the two of them, the still oblivious police closing in, then at them, then did the first thing he could think of: he flipped the bottom half her habit, causing her to immediately drop. When he told this story to his son years later, he use the justification that he didn't have the strength to move her. He wasn't certain Shekhu believed him, to his dismay.

While Cammy cursed up a storm, Alan dug through his luggage and shoved a bag of coffee into the official's arms, who the underwear flash had failed to distract.

"Here! Now, will you let us through?"

The official looked at the bag of coffee, smelled it, then at his luggage. "Give me that pocket video game."

"Fine, take it! Now!"

The official gave Cammy one last death-glare, and without breaking eye contact, reached behind his back to open the gate with his key. "Go."

"Pleasure doing business with you, sir," he fired back, grabbing Cammy and pulling. When he failed to move, he released her and scrambled through the tunnel towards the spacecraft. Cammy soon appeared behind him, none too pleased. The police had been about three people away from them.

"Idiot."

"It worked, didn't it?" he countered.

It was the Year of the Republic 414. Within a matter of hours, they were out of the Homeworld System and making a sub-ether jump only about four light-years to Ender, the ancient Ctarl-Ctarl frontier world from the days of pre-FTL travel according to the inflight magazine he read. There were no Imperial entanglements, thankfully, so he was only left to deal with the Kata-Kata themselves on his way back to Terran Space.


	8. 22 Terran Standard Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_22 Terran Standard Years Ago_

It wasn't until they learned that Alan Chandrasekhar was on Harvest that the Center, and Gregory, were able to express just how upset they were with him. Alan didn't really care; he was in the capital of the autonomous Kata-Kata Republic, deep in the center of the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. For the Space Forces, he might as well have vanished behind an event horizon of a black hole on the edges of the galaxy. He was not as diligent as he could have been getting a hold of them.

The Democratic People's Republic, as the Kata-Kata called it, was a tiny nation, barely one planet, with no indigenous space travel capability and barely any major industry. Fitting its name, Harvest was overwhelmingly agricultural, and selling surplus food to anyone who would take it—mostly the empire though—was how the economy functioned. By comparison, the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire's economy, Alan knew, consisted of three common markets that were among the five largest economies in the known universe. The empire paid for its huge military, roughly speaking, by colonizing and terraforming worlds, investing deeply in infrastructure projects, nationalizing massive corporations that in Terran Space would have been their own sovereign entities, and heavily taxing anyone they could, especially the rich and the nobility. Working class people like Alan pretended to be barely paid anything with their small, pocket-sized tax cards. If corporations, or anyone else for that matter, resisted, it was war. This being the Ctarl-Ctarl, simultaneously the galaxy's most dangerous warriors and their most obedient taxpayers, it actually worked pretty well, when you ignored the empire's debt was almost a third of their gross national product. Every so often, he'd hear of a massive scandal of a bank or an insurance company or a starship manufacturer having committed years of tax evasion: right before Alan left, there was a major scandal involving the empire's leading consumer software manufacturer having evaded paying taxes for a whole two years by storing money in fake, employee-less shell corporations in the U.S.S.A. and elsewhere in Terran space, which ended with the Imperial Army Special Forces literally storming their headquarters and arresting everyone, or worse. The public ate this sort of thing up, a reminder that, at least in practice if not in theory, no one was above the tax law.

By comparison, the Kata-Kata paid for their nonexistent military and socially-minded government by selling as much food as they could manage, after fulfilling their own food ration commitments. In boom years, people ate well. In bust years, they went hungry. But no matter what, hospitals and schools were free, just like they were in the empire. More unusually, so was housing and food—so long as they were available. Never mind planets, there were cities in the empire that had larger economies than the whole republic. But no one ever got killed or shot at for evading taxes.

It was a fascinating place, when he and Cammy, the Kata-Kata whom had ruined everything, arrived. If the Ctarl-Ctarl were strange, their Kata-Kata dissidents were really alien. Almost the whole planet was a farming commune, divided into thousands of small towns amid the prefectures and provinces.

Cammy's home was a apparently typical example of life on a collective farm. She ived with her extended family, apparently small by Ctarl-Ctarl standards, as the Kata-Kata discouraged large families. They lived a very modest life in a country cottage on the farm, along with two other families who shared the same plot of a few hectares. They farmed what basically looked like delicious maize, with a handful of old machines imported off world, which they periodically loaded onto a truck from the nearby town that in turn loaded it onto a train to be sent to the granary. The same truck took their ration papers and gave them their share of the crop to consume, along with some cash. They did this until Harvest's aptly long harvesting season ended (the planet had a very minor tilt on its axis). They were not efficient: Ctarl-Ctarl agricultural worlds produced twice as much as they did, with a fifth the population.

"I can see why you decided to become a stripper," he told Cammy when he saw their farm. Another punch that left him writhing on the ground.

Since Alan's Imperial money was no good, Cammy told him to sleep in the barn that first night, which he couldn't really object to. He didn't stay in disguise for long. The morning after the night they'd arrived from Ender, the frontier world near the Harvest System, Cammy slammed open the barn door and woke him with a piercing whistle.

"W-What? What the hell?"

"Get rid of your disguise. You've been found."

"_What_?"

Technically she was correct—and obtusely irritating at the same time. Information had filtered out on the Imperial Telecom Agency's primary TV news provider, Home News, that the government was now hunting for a Terran sleeper agent who'd lived in, of all places, North Dorov. Alan stupidly held onto hope that some other spy, someone he didn't know since he was the only one in North Dorov, was being searched for. Then they showed a mug shot of Alan Sheko-Sheko, wearing the same Nehru shirt he always wore, frowning unhappily—the photo he'd had to pose for to rent his apartment in the first place. Even without his makeup, Alan recognized he still closely resembled the target of a planet-wide manhunt.

"_The imposter, going under the name Alan Sheko-Sheko, lived in this quiet community in North Dorov. The Imperial Intelligence Bureau now believes the Terran was in the employ of Earth's United Space Forces._"

Cammy stared at him out of the corner of his eye at the back of the café. "Pretty close, huh?"

It was actually completely correct. "Shut up! This is all your fault," he hissed back.

"How's that?" Cammy snapped back, standing on the edge of her chair, legs bent and apart, as she frequently did.

"_It is unknown how long he had infiltrated the Capital, but were it not for the coincidence of being the victim of an unrelated criminal assault and treated by a police medic, it's like he would have remained hidden._"

"Oh right. That."

Alan was positively furious now, only resisting the urge to strike her with the knowledge that she'd hit him back, and possibly kill him in the process.

The news report went on, elaborating how the entirety of Little Terra and every Terran-established synagogue or mosque in the area had been turned upside-down in the manhunt. Unsurprisingly, that little fact wasn't afforded more time than interviews with Ctarl-Ctarl who had apparently witnessed him, unknowingly, in the act—people he worked with as a busboy, the tram driver he saw every morning, his landlord (technically the agent employed by the municipal government to collect rent and keep everything in order).

And then, of course, they brought in Ms. Vera Tomoro-Tomoro. Ms. Vera, still wearing her sleeveless sundress and frilly apron, with her two children holding onto her dress tightly, was bawling uncontrollably. She was being interviewed by a reporter who looked almost exactly like a Terran reporter, with a dark green blazer and a blouse. The children seemed unaffected.

"_I-I can't believe it! I-I can't believe Mr. Alan…I mean, a foreign spy, would do something like this! H-How can they just come to our homes and do….all of this! What have we done to deserve this?_"

Even the Imperial reporter interviewing her looked uncomfortable. "_Uh, Ms. Vera, it appears as though no one was harmed in connection with the foreign spy despite the presumed length of his visit, with the possible exception of a Ctarl-Ctarl exotic dancer working in Little Terra…_"

He was promptly cut off by more loud bawling from Ms. Vera. "_I-I can't believe it! How can do they do this? How many times did he babysit my children? What if-What if something had happened! What will happen to the empire the day we can't even trust our own neighbors to help each other? W-When that happens, there's absolutely no hope left for intelligent life!_"

The waterworks resumed, while Alan felt a knot in the pit of his stomach. Standing near him, a short, round Corbanite—or rather, a Corbanite in a short, round environmental suit—clicked his photoreceptors and gave a sort of nod.

"Well, I bet he feels like the biggest sack of shit ever, huh?" he said, to no one in general. "Look at that poor girl."

Alan grunted loudly. After this development, he had no choice but to stay in Cammy's family cottage. He concocted a simple excuse: he was a Terran who helped Cammy flee Home after a government raid nearly got her, which Cammy collaborated. Thus, they could work together to find some way to get rid of their strange houseguest.

She lived with her parents, her maternal grandmother, three brothers, a twin sister, an aunt, her sister-in-law, and her twin nieces: again, small for a Ctarl-Ctarl extended family. Cammy's father was not actually a farmer, but worked in the grain mills, or would have if the local millworkers weren't on strike. Kata-Kata workers would often strike over grievances, unlike in the empire. Everyone else, except for Cammy's twelve-year-old brother, worked on the farm. They were very modest, down-to-Earth type people, Alan noticed.

"What did you do in Terran Space, Mr. Chandrasekhar?" Cammy's twin asked—she looked just like her sister, but with short, dark hair and not wearing makeup or a headband.

"I worked for Angel Links, a private security company."

"What's that?"

Alan didn't have any luck explaining the concept of privatized military forces to her or anyone else, which just reminded him of how ridiculous the concept felt to him, a veteran navy man, as well.

Cammy's family tilled the fields, which, like everywhere else in the universe, was tremendously boring work. Thankfully, that wasn't all there was to the republic. There were foreigners among the Kata-Kata; like him, they could hardly be called "normal" either. He read in the newspapers of the Sagely Yellam, an exceedingly old, esteemed Ctarl-Ctarl man who was the leader of a pacifistic cult that had proliferated throughout the Empire and vaguely reminded of Gaudiya Vaishnavism back home, or the Hare Krishnas. Since this was Harvest, you could actually just visit whatever town the Sage was staying at and visit him in person. Despite his esteem, Cammy and a others just called him "the eunuch." This was not accurate—a little research into the topic revealed to Alan that the great sage was not a eunuch, in the sense that Terrans understood it, but actually a female-to-male transsexual who had stopped being a woman many decades ago, as well as undergoing chemical sterilization along with hormone treatments for unexplained reasons.

This was the sort of information that, while by no means secret, was not known to Terrans. The naval manuals on the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire, on topics like religion or culture, were filled with information that was flat-out wrong at times, or at least woefully inadequate for what they set out to do. The whole farce was starting to bother Alan—when he became an older man, it would mean a great deal to him. He learned stranger, more surprising things, particularly about the Kata-Kata but about the empire as a whole, that he had no real way of documenting aside from writing notes on it. The whole time, he was searching for a way to contact Gregory. When he found it—using a public telephone in town, patched through a line to the Terran Chamber of Commerce on Ender—he braced himself.

"_Well, you're still alive?_"

"I was hoping you'd be happy to hear that," he replied. Despite being disguised electronically, he was fairly certain the voice belonged to Gregory. It had a certain unmistakable smugness about it, holding back a torrent of anger. "I know I made a mistake, but it wasn't my fault."

"_That's not how this works, Alan._"

"No, that is bulls-!" he snapped, then lowering his voice. "Just because I'm on a covert op for the Ministry doesn't somehow make logic and reality inapplicable! What could I possibly do about a fleeing fugitive knocking me out on the street?"

"_You should have been prepared…_"

"Shut up," Alan demanded. "We're not talking about this anymore. Do you have any further orders?"

"_Yes. For completely reasons completely unrelated to your failure-_" Alan thought for certain that this was sarcasm, even with the distortion, "-_the Center is taking a different direction with the network. We've become more interested at the Royal Shipyards at Homeworld 8, Midway and Current's Turn. On top of all this, you're being directly recalled to Heifong_."

"Just as well. My 'face' is all over the news now. I'll leave Harvest as soon as I can."

"_Make sure you do. No more detours, Alan_."

Afterwards, Alan's focus was on getting back to the Heifong System, however he could. He mentioned it to Cammy, who agreed—or at the very least, wanted him off her planet and out of her hair as soon as possible. She came up with a solution first: he'd hire himself out on a passing Outlaw ship, the _Shambhala_. The _Shambhala _was a heavily armed, extensively modified blockade runner that used to belong to the Kei Pirates but now belonged to a particularly scrappy old Corbanite by the name of Tsongho. Alan had a few reservations—not specifically about theship's crew but about the rather long list of things he could imagine going wrong. Cammy had none of that, and given his position, he could hardly refuse. He said his polite goodbyes, thanked Cammy's family for their hospitality, and the two took the day long train ride to the provincial capital, and the nearest spaceport.

He arrived at the provincial capital—a small, even quaint city—with little more besides the worn-out clothes on his back. Obviously, Cammy had traded her exotic dancing attire for what all Kata-Kata farmers wore: overalls, boots, and a baggy cloak and scarf, and she'd put her hair into two long braids that reached to her calves. They found the _Shambhala _easily, the high-tech ex-pirate ship stuck out in the small Kata-Kata spaceport like a sore thumb, with its captain standing out in front of it.

"So, you're Chandrasekhar?" the old Corbanite asked. Tsongho was short, spherical, and walked around with an oddly elaborate silver cane with a jewel on its head.

Cammy needlessly elbowed him. "Yes sir."

"Your girlfriend said you had naval experience."

Another elbow, as though it was his fault. "Yes, I was a technician with the Angel Links patrol fleet out of Heifong. I worked on the engineering section of multiple deep-space cruisers."

"And you know Munchausen drive systems?"

"Of course."

The Corbanite looked at his human associates, your typically rough, snide, sleeveless Outlaw-types. "I think he'll do. We'll get you passage to the Tenpa Empire, it's our next port of call."

"Thank you, captain."

As the Outlaws filed into their expensive ship, Alan looked at Cammy. "I guess this is it."

"I guess so," she remarked coolly.

"In spite of everything, I do want to thank you for your help," he said, sticking out his hand. "And for the big lunch," he added, referencing the large meal she'd treated to him of plain tasting meat and maize stew and vegetables. Cammy had eaten at least six times what he had, and it was still a big meal—the Kata-Kata kept the Imperial tradition of treating people to meals, it seemed.

She stared at it for a few moments and shook it.

"Good luck, comrade," she said in her own Kata-Kata tongue. He couldn't respond, so he just nodded and walked into the ship.

Harvest's white-blue sun was beginning to set when he went to board the _Shambhala, _which was definitely a Kei Pirate vessel when he got a closer look at it. Climbing up the gantry, he took one last look at Harvest's rolling hills and endless farmland. When he turned back, something hit him in the back of the neck, hard enough to drop him to the floor instantly.

It wasn't enough to knock him out, but it did take a few minutes for his vision to return. Standing above him, wooden _bokken _in hand, was a young bald man in heavy grey cloak and combat boots, an Outlaw _kenjutsu _master he imagined. Beyond him was the Corbanite, who strolled over to him leisurely.

"Chandrasekhar, right?" the suit-wearing alien asked. "It doesn't seem like you noticed that our ship's drive systems are in acceptable condition."

Alan moaned as the kenjutsu master leaned on his right hand with his foot.

"You see, this is a very high-quality ship, but it costs a lot to maintain. My associates and I, however, think that the Empire's Intelligence Bureau will pay an exorbitant fee for a Terran spy, especially one they're already looking for."

Alan's breathing seized up, but there was no point in panicking. "Whatever it is…whatever they pay you…"

"You'll double it? Quadruple it? Chandrasekhar, you don't even have enough to afford passage off Harvest, do you?"

_I really need to stop relying on Outlaws for anything. Especially travel. _His thoughts were interrupted when the boot put more weight on his hand, crushing his fingers.

"That's enough, Touji. Just put him under for the rest of the trip."

"LET THE TERRAN GO," a familiar voice growled loudly and dangerously.

Alan couldn't see, but he soon found out, had he been able to he would have seen Cammy standing just past the gantry stairs, on the loading platform around the _Shambhala_.

Tsongho bobbed a bit. "Why aren't I surprised? Chandrasekhar, it's your girlfriend with the knockers and the braids."

"I'm not his girlfriend," Cammy growled back gutturally. "Now drop the Terran!"

"You know, whoever-you-are, my ship has launch clearance, my time is valuable and I hate stretching this sort of thing out. Everyone, open fire," he ordered casually. Behind him, several Outlaws armed with rifles did just that, as Touji swiftly dragged him across the steel floor and out of the way. He was starting to get used to this sort of thing.

Alan barely made out the sight of a barrage of gunfire filling the whole area, bouncing and ricocheting all around a half-hunched Cammy as she crossed her arms over her face. It continued for the few seconds it took to empty the 30-round magazines on a half-dozen assault rifles. As the dust cleared and the shell-casings bounced about, Cammy lowered her arms: her overalls and cloak were shredded by gunfire, but she was still standing.

"You've…made a big mistake…" Cammy growled. Moving in front of Tsongho, his Outlaws began awkwardly reloading their weapons.

"Really? What's the best way to deal with a vicious animal?"

_Uh oh_, Alan thought.

"A vicious animal?" Cammy asked. Her entire body, half crouched, was taunt, her muscles flexing underneath her ruined overalls as she pulled her poncho off. "You want to see a vicious animal? How about I show you aliens…what kind of vicious animals…I COME FROM!"

It was at that point where Alan, still in Touji's grip, stared into the night sky opposite Harvest's setting son, just in time to see its lone, ruptured moon hanging above them. There was the crackling of thunder, seeming distant, as Cammy's rags began to twitch from static discharge. Alan looked at Cammy, and recognized her posture: legs bent and apart, chest out, arms back, head hung forward, her massive Ctarl-Ctarl canines bared. Her crimson eyes became catlike and looked huge, her eyelids pulled back impossibly far, and the air around her began to swirl from heat exchange.

It was at that point that the shooting resumed. With a deep, animalistic growl, Cammy swung her right arm about, actually deflecting one bullet that came particularly close to her head against her wrist. Tsongho raised his cane, which glowed brightly as the elaborate metalwork began spinning. Alan didn't recognize it at first, even after a single, powerful shot exploded forth from the end like a cannon. A yellow disc of spinning electrons smashed into Cammy, blinding everyone. Even before his own vision recovered, Cammy had leapt out from the blast—at least, it looked like Cammy briefly. By the time it descended on Tsongho and knocked his cane weapon out of his hand, it was less a woman and more a black-furred tiger with red eyes and massive teeth. A single bloody second later, and Tsongho's arm was ripped clear out of the suit's socket, a bloody mess in the tiger's jaws. Amid Tsongho's muffled screams, the pair rolled, and it was a nude woman again. Still holding onto him, Cammy brought her elbow down on the front of his suit, crushing it in a loud crack followed by a bloody splash.

It was at that point Alan realized he couldn't breathe, and Touji, with his free hand, was crushing his windpipe. He gave a muffled gasp as he began to blackout. Cammy leapt at him, catching the bokken and snapping it with one hand, before crushing Touji's skull with the same amount of force from the other. After a sickeningly wet crack, Alan fell to the ground, hacking and coughing, trying to speak.

"Cammy, stop! CAMMY STOP!" he screamed once he could.

The Outlaws had dispersed, leaving behind their assault rifles and knives. Cammy stood, with her long braids and her dark skin, just in front of the _Shambhala_'s hatch.

"Let them go," he gasped, trying to rise to his feet. "It's not worth it."

Her chest heaving, Cammy stood still, naked and her arms stained with black and red blood up to her elbows. After a few seconds, she stood up straight and her posture returned to normal. When he stopped about two meters away from her, among the corpses, she turned to him. Her eyes had returned to normal, and she gave him a sad, even apologetic smile.

"How have you survived as a spy?" she asked, half way between laughing and crying.

He said nothing first, feeling his bruised neck. "How did you know they would…?" he asked finally.

She pointed at her ears, twitching them redundantly. "Good hearing, unlike you."

As Cammy walked back to her hole-filed poncho, Alan carefully reached into Tsongho's mangled corpse and took out the small satchel he'd worn on his back, then his cane. It was hot to the touch, and he dropped it.

"What kind of weapon was that?"

"I'm…not sure. It looks ancient." He glanced at her. "It didn't seem to affect you."

"We Travelers are still Ctarl-Ctarl," she reminded him. Months later, when he investigated what he'd seen, he'd learned what kind of weapon it was and also what it had fired: a so-called No. 13 caster shell, a weaponized form of Taoist sorcery.

He didn't think of it much at the time. "I suggest you start travelling fast, because when those Outlaws get back…"

She laughed tiredly. "There are a billion of my countrymen who will protect me from some weakling Outlaws. Haven't you learned to worry about yourself?"

He fell to his knees, exhausted. "I suppose so," he muttered, looking at the waiting ship. "We're here, after all."

"Can you pilot one of these…what do you call them…?"

The last glimpse of Harvest's sun vanished behind the horizon. "A grappler ship? I really don't know."


	9. 20 Terran Standard Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_20 T.S. Years Ago_

Like any member of a mortal species, Alan Chandrasekhar desperately wished he could have benefited from hindsight over the course of his life. This was never truer than that period of time, two decades prior, when he returned to Terran space after his failed stint as an infiltrator, a time that coincided with failure of the Oracion Peace Pact and the escalation towards the next Terran-Ctarl-Ctarl War.

It was, of course, a period of unsteady, deceptively unstable peace before a resumption of hostilities. It was also the low point of Alan's adult life, probably his life as a whole. It was the natural outgrowth of his perceived failures and inadequacies to his superiors in the U.S.F. Navy and his clinging to his military career. There was even a time where he thought he'd made a mistake, not listening to the Outlaw Kai Feng and giving it all up. He thought about pursuing a 'permanent' solution to all of his problems, a very dark place for him.

Life got better, but, as the saying went, not before it got worse. That was true not just for him, but for the known universe, as far as a peaceful, prosperous galaxy was concerned.

Returning from Harvest on the _Shambhala_, a Kei Pirate grappler ship he hadn't intended to abscond with but ended up doing so anyway, Alan didn't know how bad things would get. He did have an inkling though. The ship, of course, was not his to keep, and was promptly impounded at Heifong Prime Naval Base upon his return. He spent the expected week in confinement as Angel Links, which had only grown in prestige and power in his absence, tried to confirm with the Space Forces Ministry on Earth as to who he was, even as many of the same old faces recognized him.

That was expected, and just the beginning of his troubles. A conversation with now-Captain Duuz, his old comrade, summed it up well. Duuz was actually happy to see him, or as happy as a Saurians ever got.

"Chandrasekhar, I still think you are a man of honor."

He should have known that was a bad sign. "Thank you, Duuz, but what do you mean?"

"The Admiralty has confirmed your identity, and presumably, you'll be returned to active duty as a commissioned officer."

"But?"

Duuz looked unhappy—not angry or self-righteous, but unhappy. That was another bad sign. "Comrade, whatever you did in the empire, I don't think they're going to let it go. There's talk of disciplinary action, about whatever they can do short of a dishonorable discharge from duty."

"I…I did everything I was told."

"Of course you did!" Duuz declared righteously. "It's…it's these private corporate...gah!" he yelled.

Duuz paced around his cell rapidly, trying to collect his thoughts. It was little consolation that he was as upset as Alan was. "They're not happy, Chandrasekhar. I don't think they'll allow you to return to a command at Heifong. Or anywhere else, possibly."

_F-ing Gregory_, he thought. He'd think that a lot for the next few years.

Duuz was right. Eventually, he was cleared by the Admiralty on Terra, but he was not returned to duty. He was given no orders, and much of his back-pay withheld. He didn't know what he expected, as if he would just leave the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire and go back to the bridge of a ship like the _Nova 3. _But he hadn't expected to be, in effect, unemployed and unwanted.

It wasn't long before he began to feel depressed, and from there, enter what would probably be called a depression.

Almost immediately after his release, he tried to contact both his parents and his son, Trang Shekhar Hieu. There was not much to say to the other Chandrasekhars, far off in the Tenpa Empire. His aging father and mother, and his brother, knew he'd been sent on an undercover mission, and were happy to learn of his return, if surprised. He promised to visit them, and they insisted upon wiring him some money at the first inkling that he might not be as well-off, financially, as he'd expected to be.

Shekhu, and the Trang Family, was more complicated complicated. Shekhu was now seven years old and an upstanding youngster in the upper crust of Heifong III society. He was a leader in the Young Pioneers, a model student, a decent footballer. He also barely knew who his father was, having last seen him years earlier. Alan's ex-wife, Minh, actually actively encouraged him to spend his time with his son, more than she was obligated by their divorce. Alan suspected she saw his increasing melancholy and dark outlook on life, and felt sorry for him. He hated that.

Still, it was something to do. His daily life settled into gloomy repetition: staying in an inexpensive hostel, eating cheap food and watching television endlessly: all things that probably just made his mental condition worse. When Shekhu was in the mood, or his mother told him so, Alan got to spend time with his son, getting him to practice his Hindi, kicking the football about, telling him what he was allowed to about his 'career' in the navy. Shekhu love that in particular: Alan could tell him stories about his patrols on the _Nova 3_, or his time during the war, and his young eyes would light up. While he was probably his own harshest critic, it was the only time Alan felt like his son saw him as a hero or an inspiration, and not the thin, unhappy, melancholic parental figure who didn't seem to do anything or contribute anything. Minh's family ensured that Shekhu wanted for not, and they probably would have even helped him out, financially. Alan flat-out refused—instead, he scratched out his meager, cheap existence on what little of his back pay he had secured, a loan from comrades of the past, and the not unsubstantial Chandrasekhar family coffers, money that would have gone into a trust fund to be left to him after his parents' passing. And why not? Alan couldn't even bring himself to think of where he'd be in a year, much like ten or twenty.

At least things got better when he was with Shekhu. The two went on excursions all over Heifong III, especially when summer or winter vacation came, just the two of them.

"Did you know mummy has a boyfriend?" he told him once, sitting next to him as they took a break during a hike on what qualified as a mountain on Heifong.

"Does she?" he asked. In truth, Alan didn't even consider his ex-wife's romantic life. At his current standing, it didn't even register as an issue.

"Yes, dad."

"What does he do?"

"He's a doctor, like mummy."

"Are they good together?"

"I think so. _Nana_ and _Nani_ both like him. A lot," he explained, referencing his maternal grandparents.

"That's good, I'm happy for her," he said. Honestly, he didn't even care, but he wasn't unhappy at the thought. In retrospect, he should have been surprised a woman like Minh wasn't already remarried. It must have been her preoccupation with her career, Shekhu, or both.

The two sat quietly around the campsite lamp.

"Are you going to get married, dad?"

That caught him by surprise. "What brought this about?"

"I think mum will get married. Why don't you?"

Alan couldn't say whether his anxiety and melancholy blocked out his romantic considerations, or if he was just feeling so sorry for himself, with his career on the downward spiral. "I don't know, Shekhu. I really don't."

Shekhu nodded and looked away, as the two ate their packed lunches. "What was it like? With the Ctarl-Ctarl."

Generally speaking, Alan was not allowed to disclose the details of his covert infiltration to anyone. But there was an understanding in the Space Forces that there were certain things you could tell your children that were harmless enough. Minh's family wasn't stupid—they knew he'd been working in the Empire—and Shekhu was very smart for his age.

"It was very different. In retrospect, it wasn't so bad," he admitted. He turned to him and smiled. "Did you want to come with me?"

To his surprise, he beamed at him. "Maybe."

There were times Shekhu didn't behave like a seven-year-old. Things like that reminded Alan how smart, even dangerously so, the young boy was.

"They're a lot of fun," he said finally, laughing.

"I wish I could see some."

"Well, there were some Terrans living with them. Perhaps, one day, you'll see a Ctarl-Ctarl living here."

"Really? Terrans like you and me?"

His mind thought of Mr. Restaurateur. "A lot like you and me."

"Wow!"

In addition to being good with a football, well-spoken, a born leader, do-it-all Shekhu like to draw. This was actually something he might have inherited from his father, if such a thing were possible. Alan had spent much of his childhood sketching, especially when he thought he might have a future as a writer. When _that _turned out to be a dead end, he stopped drawing, and the would-be _manga-ka _became a navy officer instead.

"Well, you see, Ctarl-Ctarl women have long hair. Very long hair, sometimes," he explained, with Shekhu sitting in his lap, holding his sketchpad. He took his son's little hand and guided it, giving the cartoonish sketch Shekhu was attempting long hair.

"Like this?"

"Like that." He looked at his son. "Why do you find them so interesting?"

"Because they're aliens," he responded swiftly, not looking from the sketchpad.

"Well, that's true, my dear boy. Do you ever draw Corbanites or Silgrians?"

"No, not really."

"Why not?"

"They're _too _alien."

Alan raised an eyebrow. It was true, of course, that the anatomical similarities between Terrans and Ctarl-Ctarl were uncanny, even miraculous. "Well, maybe you should. I don't want you becoming prejudiced."

"Dad!" Shekhu shouted.

"I'm sorry, am I censuring your art?"

He nodded rapidly. Shekhu was smart. The two went to sleep in their tent, Alan suffering from the insomnia he'd suffered from ever since he returned to Terran space, as though it accompanied the lighter gravity. When they returned from hiking, he decided to tell Minh about the conversation.

"I…don't get it," she admitted, finally.

"You don't think it was a little strange?" he asked.

"He's seven years old, Alan. He has an imagination."

"It didn't really sound like an imagination," he said, looking at the incomplete drawing. Shekhu was at the age where he'd discovered the more apparent secondary sexual characteristics possessed by women, even if he didn't understand their purpose, or possess the capability to artistically render them, thankfully.

She laughed at him—she did a lot of that, it felt like.

"Maybe I should stop telling him those stories," he muttered.

"Oh, come on, why not! He's a little boy, let him have his fun! You're his father, after all."

"I don't want him getting an impression about the Space Forces," he informed her. This only elicited more laughter.

"And what's wrong with that?"

"I can think of a few things," he told her stiffly.

If things were good for Minh, with her doctor boyfriend, things were getting worse for Alan. As he endlessly waited word from the U.S.F., he set about finding some other job, really anything to keep him from sitting alone, inactive at the hostel. Spending his adulthood in the navy paid its price, though, and he didn't really have a variety of skills. He began to think he shouldn't have given up on the idea of being an author or a manga-ka.

Life settled into a pattern for him. Around him, the universe was changing though. There was a huge wedding in the Einhorn Reich, perhaps the largest in Terran history, as the Kaiser took wife. The Pyotr Empire's Academy of Sciences, the oldest continuing scientific institution in Terran space that went back to the ancient academy on Terra, revolutionized the study the very early universe, narrowing down the exact events of the grand unification epoch—the sort of thing Alan couldn't hope to understand. There were more scandals and palace intrigue amid the Tenpa Empire. Most importantly, the U.S.F. continued a massive ship-building campaign, commissioning no less than a dozen massive super-carriers and as many as fifty cruisers, just as the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire expanded its own military forces. By this point, Alan had all but written off his military career, and barely followed the expansion of the navy. It took something much more severe and dramatic to pull him out of his melancholy existence.

About twenty months after returning to Terran space, on his way to _another _job interview that would probably end in _another _rejection, Alan's hovercar was nearly knocked off the road by a much larger cargo hauler that sideswiped him.

"What the hell! A-hole!" he screamed, enraged and wiping the coffee he'd spilled off his dull grey working clothes. At this point, he hardly cared what happened to him, but the last thing he wanted to contend with was a spike in his insurance premiums. When he marched over to the other driver, he found what was wrong, seeing him preoccupied with news broadcast on the video monitor.

"What is _wrong _with you?" Alan screamed at the top of his lungs, feeling a deep-rooted desire to turn into a monster and tear the careless driver apart.

When the driver finally spoke, he kept his eyes on the monitor. "Have you seen this?"

"Do I look like a give a…what is _wrong _with you?"

"Shut up and look!"

After a few more moments of hysterical screaming and nearly bursting a blood vessel, Alan looked at the screen. The details weren't immediately apparent at the time, but the video news was covering the Oracion Peace Conference in the U.S.S.A., where a treaty was supposed to have been in the works that would finally demilitarize the border worlds and establish normal, working relations with the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. Instead, something had gone horribly wrong, and the representatives of the Empire were now threatening to walk out.

"My God, there's going to be another war."

"Really? Maybe you should care about me killing you right now, instead, you maniac!"

Alan hadn't appreciated it at the time, but what he was witnessing was the start of the second war between Terrans and the Ctarl-Ctarl in that decade. He'd never considered that, in actuality, that horrible conflict would be no less than his salvation, and would permanently change the fortunes of not only him, but his son Shekhu. It was not the worse war fought by Terrans since the Towards Star period began, that dubious honor remained in the hands of the horrific intra-Terran fighting that nearly consumed the species, but it was easily the worse war they'd fought with the Ctarl-Ctarl yet. It was Alan's second chance at that proud life he'd lost. And even as almost the entirety of the war was fought in Terran space, sooner or later, he'd find himself in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire once more. The names he'd never thought he'd never hear of again: Home, the Travelers, the Hashiyo-Hashiyo Dynasty and the proud Clan-Clan family; he was dragged back to them, not entirely unwillingly either.


	10. 19 Terran Standard Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_19 T.S. Years Ago  
United Space Forces Headquarters_

After the war ended, Alan Chandrasekhar began engaging in a practice that would prove to be very helpful: ferociously reading intelligence reports that covered events that he wasn't present at, but closely impacted him nonetheless. While he was still living off Chinese lunch specials that supplied multiple meals with each cheap order, at U.S.F. Headquarters on Old Earth, the pieces were coming together that would change his life forever.

Meeting at the Admiralty were the U.S.F. Naval Minister, six top fleet admirals, and the secretary general of the Terran Parliament, the supranational legislature for the four great Terran nations. Also present were representatives from the four great Terran guilds. These men and women—mostly men, to be truthful—were among the most powerful Terrans in the universe, entrusted with a nearly unimaginable amount of power and influence, alongside practically unlimited resources. Some had been present at the Oracion Peace Conference. The notable exception were the 'pirate kings' like the infamous Lord Hazanko. Though the pirate leaders were not necessarily snubbed, they were not present at this Space Forces war summit, for obvious reasons. To this day, Alan couldn't say if that decision had crippled the war effort from the start.

Among the invited, their conversation, according to the records, went as follows:

"We're all in agreement that a settlement with the Ctarl-Ctarl would be most desirable?" asked the Secretary General.

"Of course," the Naval Minister agreed. "And we're not ruling that out as a possibility. But the situation demands we be prudent."

There was uniform agreement from the representatives, even if they didn't actually feel that way. It was important to present a united front to the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire. There some meaningless platitudes and small-talk, before they confronted their military situation.

The Naval Minister did most of the talking. "As you know, the Ctarl-Ctarl order of battle is organized differently than ours—the task force remains their preferred military unit, with very specific assignments and fairly limited autonomy. The Ctarl-Ctarl are particularly fond their pursuit lines—heavy emphasis on destroyers, heavy frigates and fast cruisers—which account for as much as 70% of the ships in their task forces."

"Accounting for their current naval rebuilding campaign from the last war, how many of these task forces do the Ctarl-Ctarl possess?" Alan didn't know who asked this, as the records were partially censored when he found them.

"Our intelligence suggests just over three hundred operational task forces," a fleet admiral explained.

"Three _hundred_? How accurate is our intelligence?"

"We have no reason to doubt it."

"Likewise, the Ctarl-Ctarl have at least seven major fleets, alongside their reserve fleets. They're comparable to our expeditionary fleets, though smaller."

The representative of the Pyotr Empire asked the next question. "Assuming we're at war in a month, with our own rebuilding campaign, where do we stand?"

"The United Space Forces includes nine expeditionary fleets, three reserve fleets, and the unified corporate fleet. If combined with our task forces that accounts for at least 90% of our current operational forces."

"How many task forces do we have?"

"Forty-two."

This conference, still kept secret from the public, basically set up the course of the whole war. The Ctarl-Ctarl Imperial Navy outnumbered all the Terran navies, combined, at almost 3-to-1. If you optimistically factored out the portions of those navies used for local policing and anti-piracy, it was still 2-to-1 in their favor. The Terrans had twice as many carriers and supercarriers, which were organized both defensively and offensively (by contrast, Ctarl-Ctarl carriers where organized defensively). The Ctarl-Ctarl had almost _seven times_ as many cruisers and twice as many 'big-gun' destroyers, versus interdiction and anti-fighter destroyers. Since the Ctarl-Ctarl hardly utilized fighters and were conservative with their bombers, this meant they had twice as many destroyers in effect.

On paper, it looked like a disaster waiting to happen. If this intelligence had been available ten years earlier, Alan probably wouldn't have even have fought in his first war in the first place, he imagined. And yet, there was another Ctarl-Ctarl War. Maybe the philosophers were correct, in that _any _war was a losing scenario.

Then again, none of that meant anything to Alan, at least not at first. He was too busy being miserable, underemployed (or unemployed), reflecting on all the mistakes he'd made in the course of his life that brought him this point. It was all terribly self-absorbed, but that could be said, cruelly, about a lot of depression people felt, especially middle-class depression.

Of course, Alan wasn't the only one in despair, and it was a little selfish to think so. He was the middle child of his family, with an elder brother and a younger sister—Armaan and Indira. He did not speak to either of them regularly, and hadn't since he enter the Tenpa Naval Academy as a teenager—they just had drifted apart. He hadn't spoken to either in ten years when he heard from Indira, a few weeks after the Oracion Peace Conference blew up, figuratively.

It was bad news. Indira had her first child with her husband, a wealthy yet cheerful Tenpa businessman, a year earlier. Somehow, against all odds, Indira had caught pertussis—whooping cough—and given it to her baby. The disease almost claimed the infant, and left the couple a nervous wreck. Her husband's family was dispersed across Terran space, even more than hers, and only a few could come to assist. The Chandrasekhar Family congregated around her, trying to fix her frayed nerves, and Alan wasn't an exception.

So, Alan visited the family he wasn't really comfortable with. At least the spotlight wasn't on him and his apparent failures. There wasn't really much to do besides think, and Alan did a lot of that, sitting in his brother-in-law's holiday home on Bentengaun, a rich vacation world in the heart of the empire. When his parents could finally be convinced to go out and enjoy themselves, they had Alan watch his nephew, since he actually had somewhat recent experience with babies.

He would stare at his nephew, the small, round baby who mostly slept and smelled, like any baby. Any Terran baby, anyway—one thing he knew, and the Space Forces knew, were that despite the very close genetic similarities between Terrans and Ctarl-Ctarl, their newborns were very different. Even among the other intelligent species in the galaxy, Terran babies were, for a lack of a better word, notoriously useless, perhaps almost as useless as Corbanite newborns. They could barely function, had no motor skills, and it took time for them to stand upright, much less learn to walk.

Inevitably, he compared them to Ctarl-Ctarl, whom he'd already studied, and as he would soon find out, would study a great deal more. Ctarl-Ctarl babies were exceptionally different than Terran babies, considering they grew up into similar-looking beings. For starters, within days of birth, Ctarl-Ctarl could almost fully stand upright. Their heads were smaller—though adults had heads proportional with their bodies, Ctarl-Ctarl babies had somewhat smaller heads, hardly surprising given that Ctarl-Ctarl women could give birth to three or more of them at a time regularly. Their heads grew very quickly, quickly making them 'proportional' in the Terran opinion. They probably could have walked within a few weeks if it wasn't for the fact that Ctarl-Ctarl babies didn't open their eyes until about two weeks after their birth, after which their vision was still rather poor. That was a weakness they had compared to Terran newborns, who could actually see. They made up for, he heard, by having exceptional hearing that gave them good spatial awareness for newborns.

Another difference was disease: Ctarl-Ctarl children had fantastically strong immune systems, perhaps even more so than adults. Alan was no biologist and was only basically aware of the details, but Ctarl-Ctarl "cubs" or "kittens" as they were called enjoyed multiple layers of protection called "active immunity", inherited from both parents, which was supplemented by antibodies carried over breastfeeding. Ctarl-Ctarl did not nurse as long as Terrans did, so that advantage was lost quickly, but they remained largely immune to many diseases that bothered Ctarl-Ctarl adults. In the U.S.S.A., there was a powerful pharmaceutical corporation, PARA•SOL, who was negotiating for the rights to reproduce Ctarl-Ctarl infant antibodies in a form that could assist Terrans. Those negotiations broke down when the war began a few months later.

While thinking of this, he thought of something: though they lived shorter lives than Terrans, the Ctarl-Ctarl probably owed their massive empire not just to historical circumstance, as Terrans did, but to their biology, and not just because they could turn into vicious animals or deflect bullets. Ctarl-Ctarl women gave birth to large "litters", and quite easily, who could soon take care of themselves. They matured into puberty slightly faster, and then the process repeated itself again. He'd never heard of a Ctarl-Ctarl woman dying in childbirth, not in this millennium. It was no wonder why the Ctarl-Ctarl had an empire that was more populous than all of Terran space combined, despite their long history of horrifically bloody wars and internal genocide. On the other hand, the current rates of population growth in the empire were actually fairly unimpressive, especially when compared to the past. The answer to that was clearer: only a fraction of Ctarl-Ctarl, it seemed, had children. Imperial military personnel rarely had children until they received a permanent posting on a major world, unlike Alan, who had his first child between periods of leave from his command, like practically every other family man he knew. A good number of Ctarl-Ctarl probably died in military service before they could have children. And for the entire population, Ctarl-Ctarl needed a sort of hybrid marriage-childbirth license issued by the Imperial Ministry of the Interior before they could have children. It wasn't as though the government would abduct a child born out of license, but apparently, they wouldn't have free access to many of the empire's rather numerous social services. A draconian, but effective, method of population control. Terrans had nothing of the sort; if anything, food, clean water, and wealth were the primary constraints on childrearing, and they didn't work that often.

When his nephew was no longer at risk, his thoughts drifted to the coming storm. He spent much of his day listening to the newsfeed over audio or video, in his brother-in-law's mountain estate. Predictably enough, in the decade that followed the Oracion Peace Conference, pundits, ideologues, lobbyists, would-be generalissimos and king-makers of every kind claimed it was so obvious that Terrankind would be at war with the Ctarl-Ctarl again. In truth, as far as Alan remembered, it wasn't that obvious. That, and it was also a surprise how the war ended.

The Oracion Peace Conference was supposed to deliver the goods, to "make the galaxy safe for democracy," as people were fond of saying. To an audience who wasn't aware, Alan made a point of noting that "democracy" really just referred to the Terran consensus of legitimate sovereignty of the constitutional monarchies and republics that made of the great empires, the rights of the capitalist status quo that defined the Terran economy, and the desire to renounce war as an instrument of policy. In a sense, it was far removed from the 20th century origins of the saying on Terra, during the First World War. On the other hand, "making the world safe for democracy" on old Earth hadn't really safeguarded democracy for China, Vietnam, or many African states either.

People, particularly the diplomats, seemed hopeful. In the Presidential Palace on Oracion, an unparalleled outburst of optimism was held up through parades, demonstrations and rallies right up until the government announced the talks had fallen through. He didn't know how the Ctarl-Ctarl were taking it—the rather belligerent attitude their envoys had throughout the conference was suddenly replaced by uncharacteristic silence that lasted right up until they screamed their way out. _That _should have been a warning sign.

It was a frosty but pleasant July day, and the mountain home was picturesquely covered in snow. Alan was doing what he usually did, sending out copies of his unimpressive resume, doing anything to keep his mind of his unemployment, being unsuccessful in that regard, when a call came for him.

"Song Residence, who may I ask is calling?" he asked, holding a pot of steamed vegetables. Since he'd returned from assignment and fallen into his melancholy he'd found himself eating less and less as a habit. He'd actually lost about three kilograms without trying, though a lot of that was probably lost muscle mass as well. "This is he."

The call was from the military liaison's office in Bentengaun's capital. The office connected him to Counter Admiral Rufus Monzo, whom Alan barely remembered from the shakeup that happened in the navy at Heifong years ago: around Alan got the secret assignment in the Empire, Monzo became commander of the squadron that included the _Nova-3_. Someone, maybe Druz, had brought Alan to his attention, and with Monzo becoming a task force commander out of Heifong, on what would soon be a flashpoint on the border, he had come calling personally.

Alan wanted to refuse. Specifically, he wanted to tell Monzo to repeatedly kiss the widest part of his skinny posterior. But what choice did he have? He was depressed, losing weight, and spending time with a family he really wasn't getting any closer to liking.

He assured him good terms: a full reinstatement of his commission, the rest of the back pay owed to him, commendations for part of his assignment (the portion he hadn't screwed up), even a pathway for promotion. Alan tried to downplay his acceptance as much as possible and left Bentengaun the next day. His family was rather surprised, to put it mildly.

He went to Heifong—not the naval port but the capital city—where Monzo greeted him personally, a sign of respect, as did his subordinate, Commander Perez. Alan quickly learned that Perez was the woman who replaced him a whole seven years earlier when he was given a command at Heifong V—her rank was that of a Captain, 2nd Rank, one above him, but being from the U.S.S.A., she called herself Commander, and him Lieutenant Commander. It was one of those little things that made naval life needlessly complicated.

Alan made a point of still sounding a little like a jerk. For the first time in more than a year, he put on his uniform, got a good military haircut which was immediately hidden under his blue uniform cap, and rode with Monzo to his headquarters planetside. He was being taken to meet the brass, and was warned to watch his behavior.

"I read what you've been through, Chandrasekhar, but be careful about what you say."

"Counter Admiral, I have no problem giving my life to the Space Forces. But if you think I'm going to debase myself any further, let me tell you in advance—I will get out of this car now and crawl into a hole so dark the entire Ninth Expeditionary Fleet couldn't find me. And then all of you can fight this war on your own."

After that, the admiral relented, and he was given a small amount of freedom to say what he felt after that.

In the scheme of things, even his deep-seated resentment—resentment that would take perhaps ten years to really subside, when the universe had changed so thoroughly that the particular circumstances that had hurt him were far removed even according to himself—didn't matter, and it was selfish to think so. The war came soon and everyone, Alan, Monzo, Perez, Gregory, and the Admiralty and Secretary General, turned out to be more wrong then right.


	11. Third Quarter, 19 TS Years Ago

**A Terran in the Ctarl-Ctarl Empire**

_Third Quarter, 19 T.S. Years Ago  
10 Light Years outside the Sentinel System, Ban Guild Demilitarized Zone_

By September, Alan Chandrasekhar had returned with the 9th Expeditionary Fleet, reinstated to the rank of captain, 3rd Rank, or lieutenant commander. About two-thirds of the fleet would be sunk or scuttled in the coming twenty four months.

Alan should have expected this—he didn't because, like a lot of officers, he based his predictions on specific information, and the information provided to him was deliberately shaped in such a manner to resemble the last war, which had ended in either a "limited Ctarl-Ctarl victory" or a "_status quo ante bellum_" depended on who you asked or what online encyclopedia you consulted. The Ctarl-Ctarl did not operate outside the disputed systems in what was known before the war, at least politically, as the neutral zone and after it as the demilitarized zone. Victoria II was a world in one of those systems, attached to a binary star.

The Ctarl-Ctarl, in a uncharacteristic demonstration of subtly and strategic planning, had kept the worlds on their side, including Victoria II, disarmed. That included removing the orbital guns that had shot down the _Free Virtue_ a life time ago. They could do this because of the enormous force projection they enjoyed with their massive navy, which passed its time by having task forces shoot down pirate ships who loved using the worlds in the demilitarized zone for operations.

On the opposite side of the DMZ were three abnormally large Ctarl-Ctarl task forces: the 90th, the 110th and the 181st Royal Guards, the last of which was practically a small fleet, even if it was still much smaller than the 9th Expeditionary Fleet. The 181st was also the first unit, to Alan's knowledge, to field a number of new _Nipopopolas-_class deep space cruisers, including its lead ship, the HIMS _Nipopopolas_, and two vessels that had been witnessed by Terran infiltrators while in port, the HIMS _Orta Moto-Moto _and the HIMS _Orta Hone-Hone_, which wasn't even supposed to have been completed yet. As fast big-gun cruisers, it was believed they could give even the biggest Terran ships a run for their money. They weren't invulnerable though: in particular, the Admiralty counted on its supercarriers, and their dozens of large fighter-bombers, that a big-gun ship would have trouble tracking.

But the three task forces, poised like a waiting dagger between Blue Heaven and Heifong, were not the whole problem. The other threat came, as usual, was from what they didn't know: the three fronts—or major military formations that corresponded with army groups in conventional understanding, not the geographic term—that were waiting behind them, comfortably in Imperial space. After the war, he learned they were dubbed the 1st Heifong, the 2nd Heifong and the 1st Lang Bai, after those particular worlds in Ban Guild space. Between the three of them, they made up almost 2000 divisions and the in the area of 25 _million_ fighting Ctarl-Ctarl men and women. When Alan first learned of these numbers from soon-to-be declassified documents more than a decade later on Home, one thing immediately occurred to him: that painting he'd seen in the Ctarl-Ctarl Officer's club years earlier, of the Battle of Moscow. Somewhere, someone had told him that those same defenders later retaliated on the invaders by invading _their _country. The final city, with a name Alan recognized, Berlin, was taken with 2.5 million men, ending the war in ancient Europe.

The Ctarl-Ctarl had prepared ten times as many soldiers for one particular prong of the warfront. Twenty five million young, hardnosed soldiers who, when the time came, could probably be whipped up into an animalistic frenzy that would murder anything perceived as a threat. It wasn't Alan's job to know the numbers that the militias and civil defense forces could mobilize on all the worlds in the way of those three task forces, but in retrospect, he did not think they could have resisted 25 million "immortal" Ctarl-Ctarl.

Alan did not know the magnitude of what was about to occur, and should have been grateful. He had just returned to military life, it would have been a bad time to lose the will to live.

Fighting started on the last day of September. Alan was in command of a destroyer, the _Razor 7_, a beauty of a ship—so new the crew would occasionally find spare seats wrapped in plastic, and fast enough to run circles around U.S.F. cruisers. It was also an interdiction and anti-fighter screening ship, which Alan had reservations about immediately, though he tried to ignore them.

Very comfortably, Alan woke up as he did every day, enjoyed a private breakfast before making his way past saluting sailors and officers to the bridge.

"Good morning, Captain."

"Good morning, Lieutenant," he replied to his XO, Helen Meles, a young woman who was a fresh graduate from the Eritrean military academy on Old Earth at New Asmara, third in her class.

At his seat on the bridge, he surveyed the field of stars before him, along with the rest of the ships at the edge of the 9th Fleet. He was about to order a general maneuver, part of the continued process of breaking in the ship's normal space drive systems, when there was a ping at his personal console: he had a high-priority call.

"Lieutenant, you have the conn."

"Aye aye, sir." Meles cut a smart, tall figure in her blue greatcoat and beret, silver insignia shining in the bridge lighting.

It was a transmission from Counter Admiral Monzo, from his own command, the carrier _Vostok_. On the line was a fleet admiral from the Admiralty. Alan stood at attention.

"Sirs, for what do I owe the honor?" he asked, trying not to sound sarcastic.

"_Chandrasekhar, normally we wouldn't call on you, but as it happens, an old acquaintance of yours has revealed some substantial information just a few hours ago, and we're at a bit of a loss_," Monzo explained. He shared the primary display in Alan's study with the other admiral.

"_The undercover, embedded source, code-named 'Gregory',_" the fleet admiral explained.

There was not a name Alan wanted to hear again. "Gregory?"

"_We've been on fourth alert for almost a month now. Last night, our time, shortly after the Ctarl-Ctarl Embassy on Terra issued a general alert for all Ctarl-Ctarl to leave Terran space, he surfaced, at considerable risk. We moved him from the capital to the shipyards at Midway, but he broke orders to send us a direct communique._"

Alan remembered his infiltration protocol: messages from the Center to Terran space took several days to reach their recipient, using concealed channels that the Empire couldn't intercept easily. A direct sub-ether communication message via comm cube was dangerous and could be intercepted, even if nearly instantaneous.

"_As you can imagine, it was serious_," Monzo explained. "_According to him, the Ctarl-Ctarl just ordered the Inner Periphery border closed and launched every ship from Midway to the reserve zone. He thinks they're moving for a first-strike_."

"Well, that sounds…serious, sirs. A first strike…"

"_A first strike goes against our intelligence findings that the Ctarl-Ctarl preferred an overwhelming military response to aggression on our part, like they did in the last war_," the fleet admiral declared.

Monzo sighed. "_We've been staring at each other across the DMZ for weeks now. And while I do agree that a Ctarl-Ctarl first strike would have been more advantageous while the Ninth was still assembling a week ago, I don't think we can rule out Gregory's warning. What do you think, Alan_?"

Alan had a very deep-rooted dislike of Gregory—he blamed him, in large part, for his misery when he returned from his own infiltration. That aside, he couldn't actually give a valid complaint against Gregory or the Center's infiltration system or the intelligence they produced. "Our own observations of their task forces do not give an indication that they've even entered the final planning phase for a strike. However, code-named Gregory has been…remarkably…"

"_See, Monzo? What exactly do the Ctarl-Ctarl hope to accomplish when they haven't even finished staging yet?_"

"_Sir, while that is true, I don't think we can just rule out Gregory's warning…_"

A blaring alarm in Alan's study cut him off, followed by another voice over the speakers—this one from the bridge. "_Sir, we're detecting multiple Munchausen signatures further into the demilitarized zone! Triangulating distances..._"

Alan didn't wait for the other two to respond, instead saluting and excusing himself immediately, while he ran back to the bridge. Meles was standing at the bridge, her eyes planted on the primary display.

"Captain, we've got more than a hundred different signatures…"

"Distance?" he asked, sitting down at his seat, trying to remain calm. He'd had a month to prepare for exactly this, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Or that's what he thought.

"Projected entry distance…no, this can't be right!"

"Lieutenant!"

"Sir, they're coming in at…less than ten-thousand!"

"Ten-thousand kilometers?"

"Ten-thousand _meters_!"

"Telemetry, what the hell is going down there, I want a full system diagnos…" Alan began, standing up. He was cut off when a very deep, very long _whoooomp_ came from the bridge surround speakers, the sound generated to indicate the arrival of a mass body from sub-ether into normal space.

And then it played again.

Again.

And again.

A silence fell over the bridge. Alan turned to the primary display, currently simulating a forward-facing view. Within a few kilometers towards the border, groups of five to seven ships dropped into normal space in erratic, seemingly random positions. _Whooomp, whooomp, whooomp_.

"Sir, counting…"

"Counting one hundred and forty eight ships," Alan muttered, as another group dropped out directly in front of _Razor 7 _and its accompanying ships. The familiar hieroglyph appeared, the ship badge on the superstructure of a cruiser that dominated the forward display. The ship couldn't have been more than 2000 meters away.

"One hundred and fifty five ships," Alan muttered as the much larger ship loomed in front of them. "Begin evasive maneuvers," he ordered, trying to stay calm. Meles' eyes had grown as wide as saucers.

"Lieutenant!" Alan yelled, his voice breaking.

"Hard to starboard, full retrograde burn!" she screamed. The ship lurched abruptly, as display moved away from the nearest cruiser.

"This is the _Razor 7_, C-C warships have entered the demilitarized zone, repeat, this is _Razor 7_, confirming C-C warships have entered the demilitarized zone," a bridge officer shouted.

Alan's mind was figuratively swimming, trying to make sense of what had just happened. A Ctarl-Ctarl task force had dropped out of sub-ether at 30 different points, without indication, without firing. They had never done this before; every war the Ctarl-Ctarl had fought with Terrans, they began with a single, concentrated fleet or task force moving in unison, blasting its way through the opposition. And they never willingly engaged a force with inferior numbers. But here were 155 ships, going against nearly a thousand in the 9th Fleet.

It almost looked like an accident, a maneuver with someone failing to carry the zero in their calculations.

Then they started firing. The next few seconds—it felt much longer—were bad. Waiting for the excruciating turn to complete to keep them from colliding into the cruiser's shields.

"We've cleared the enemy cru..."

"Battle stations! Raise shields, bring all weapons online!" Alan turned so hard he almost fell out of his seat. "Bring me a firing solution off the port side, target the enemy cruiser!"

"C-C Frigate inbound on the same vector! E.T.A. to pass thirty!"

"The cruiser's turning!"

"Captain, we're being hailed by the _Vostok_!"

"Tell them to wait!" Alan turned. "Where's that firing solution?"

"I have it, sir!"

"Turrets one, four, five and six, open fire!"

From above and to the side, four pairs of yellow-white beams descended upon the cruiser. The frigate, unlucky enough to be in the way, was struck towards the bow and burst into flames. The beams continued, uninterrupted, towards the cruiser.

Cheers rang out through the bridge, though not from Alan. His eyes were planted on the display, which showed the beams pouring onto the shields a few dozen meters above the cruiser's drive shaft and after a few moments dissipating. The cheering died down as the rest of the bridge crew caught on.

"Telemetry, what's the minimum distance for a successful sub-ether jump?"

"Checking gravitational distortions and mass fields…approximately two-hundred and forty-three kilometers!"

"I want that shortest course plotted," he ordered.

"Sir!" Meles snapped.

"This is an anti-fighter destroyer, and the Ctarl-Ctarl are not deploying any fighters," Alan said, nervously feeling his left temple. "Broadcast our withdrawal signal. And bring up _Vostok_."

"Sir, a C-C destroyer dead on us, distance sixty-thousand!"

"Arm first bay nuclear torpedoes for shield dispersal," Alan ordered, as the primary display switched over to Monzo on the _Vostok_.

"_Damn it, __Chandrasekhar, what are you doing_?"

Alan looked at the admiral. "Sir, check your area display. Another task force has dropped in, hasn't it?"

Monzo blinked at him and gestured at an officer off-screen. "_Alan, what do you…?_"

"They're hot-dropping two more task forces. We couldn't possibly track them because there's nothing to track. The Ctarl-Ctarl have a new trick: don't make nice lines to wait for the enemy to shoot at you, just go charging into them and do as much damage as you can before they can respond. And it seems to be working."

Monzo didn't respond immediately.

"Sir, I'm going to keep retreating. You have another two-hundred kilometers to order me otherwise."

By now, Alan could already see that he wasn't the only one with the same idea. Monzo still said nothing, as his massive carrier took a continued beating as another task force—another 198 ships.

"Sir, two more destroyers are joining the first on their attack run!"

"I was expecting that, fire all first bay torpedoes, proximity triggers, with a three-hundred meter dispersion."

"Sir, firing!"

The twelve nuclear torpedoes stored in the _Razor 7_'s forward bay fired out, one by one, in a long string. They exploded just short of the three Ctarl-Ctarl destroyers, doing nothing to stop their attack run; instead, their explosions bathed all three of them in a powerful, now visible, electromagnetic pulse, temporarily frying their shields.

"Firing solutions for those three destroyers, target their dorsal turrets!"

"Already got them, sir!" the leading officer at the gunnery station shouted, squeezing the triggers in either hand. The _Razor 7 _pelted the guns with the weapons it had, hoping to score a hit.

Monzo finally spoke. "_All right, __Chandrasekhar, you win. I'll order a withdrawal._"

"It might be too late, sir," Alan muttered, as his personal display indicated another task force dropping out of sub-ether space, at 28 different points behind the 9th Fleet. If the Ctarl-Ctarl ships weren't so scattered and in disarray themselves, the whole fleet would have been destroyed in a triangulation of fire.

_So how long does it take three Ctarl-Ctarl task forces to get into order while under fire? I'm not waiting to find out. _

"Sir, the _Nimbus_!" someone shouted, interrupting his thoughts.

On the primary display, the _Nimbus_, the _Vostok's _sister supercarrier, appeared with a smaller Ctarl-Ctarl cruiser descending upon it. Staring at the brown and tan vessel, Alan recognized is as the new _Nipopopolas-_class that he'd been warned about by naval intelligence. Built in the Empire's favored 'umbrella' shape, it rained fire from all of its large guns simultaneously on the carrier. The _Nimbus _was already retreating when another problem presented itself: a Ctarl-Ctarl destroyer directly in front of it. The _Nimbus_'s captain then proceeded to make a fatal error: the ship turned to get out of the way, exposing its broadside to the cruiser, which proceeded to literally punch a hole in it as it made its pass. The _Nimbus _grazed the side of the wounded destroyer, but by then it was nearly cut in half by the unceasing cruiser fire.

"Looks like the Ctarl-Ctarl have themselves a real carrier killer," Alan muttered. The enemy cruiser itself would have been in incredible danger if it wasn't for the fact that its heavy shields were just able to manage the retaliatory fire from fleet in disarray, including the _Vostok _and the _Razor 7_ as it tried to flee_. _There wasn't even a safe window to launch fighters, the Ctarl-Ctarl had come in so close.

"Sir, we're actually getting the C-C chatter from a nearby vessel."

Close enough to hear their short-range radio transmissions.

"Patch it through to here," Alan muttered as they finally started to clear the burning fleet. He touched the audio control on his armrest and leaned to the speaker built into the seat—there was no point in exposing his crew to what he expected to hear.

It came in the Ctarl-Ctarl language, like a hundred voices shouting in unison. Not just shouting, cheering.

"_Nothing can stop us! We're the invincible Ctarl-Ctarl! The _Orta Hone-Hone_ isn't afraid of nothing! Nothing can stop us! We're the invincible Ctarl-Ctarl!_" The cheering continued even as the cruiser was bathed in fire from the Vostok's picket destroyers.

And they were right, as far as Alan could tell: the 9th Expeditionary Fleet was consumed in flames and the worst was yet to come.


End file.
